I had a friend tell me once that I was a lighthouse. I thought it was a nice thing to say, but I didn’t totally understand what that meant. I guess, simply, someone who emits light.
Then, many years later I met someone and thought…that person is a lighthouse. Because at the time, I was in dark, stormy waters. But in their eyes was something familiar. Like someone lighting a match in the middle of a dark room.
I felt like one of those boats, out in choppy waters on a moon-less night, trying to stay afloat. And there, in the distance and through the fog…a light. A light that says, you are not lost, come this way.
I am reminded of a trip my sister and I took to St. Augustine, FL. She was walking and dancing on a wall of stones by the bay, while the lighthouse in the distance flashed its lights in intervals. I stood with my camera, soaking up the night sky and watching her skirt sway in the wind and in rhythm with her dance.
I had to wait for the times when the light would shine in our direction, to be able to get the picture of it illuminating the scene.
And I now sit here feeling in my heart the importance of darkness and the light, and how one seems to follow the other. And even more so, that when the light isn’t shining in one direction, it’s shining somewhere else.
In May of this year, I lost all of my light. I had nothing to give and nothing to shine on anyone. I thought I might die of nothingness, as all I knew was giving.
This came as a result of “healing”. Healing that was unlike anything I’d known before. It twisted me inside out and backwards, it chewed me up, spit me out and chewed me back up again.
I came face to face with the ugliest parts of me and the ugly in others too. And for the first time, I didn’t want to run. I wanted to know what it was like to stand, tall and wide as an oak tree, face to face with everything I’d run from my whole life.
I wanted to know what would happen next.
And that’s when the light turned off.
But now I know, it didn’t turn off…it changed direction.
It lit up the inside, rather than the outside. I thought I would die, not emitting light to the external world.
And in a way, I did. I turned inside out.
And little by little, I started seeing that light emitting from me again.
May we all know what it’s like to be the lighthouse and to be the ship in dark, stormy waters. Remembering that we’re all in this together, even when we’re alone.
Love: 