light, a who...

“When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched... Then one day I was walking along Tinker creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw "the tree with the lights in it." I saw the backyard cedar...charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame... It was less like seeing than like being for the first time see, knocked breathless by a powerful glance."
                                                                                                                      Annie Dillard

A few years ago I had occasion to ask myself, "What is light -- or better still, who is light  Or, is light just an arbitrary what?"

Early in my life light was definitely a "what" as it had no more identity then its use. Like air and water, I took it for granted. Light was just light: with it I saw objects, people, color, and everything else physical eyes see. With a good idea a "light bulb went on" or one might "put light on the subject." Light stayed an "arbitrary what" for a long time.

However, over the years light has changed me. The "who" began to emerge, giving me a new set of eyes, a new awareness and now takes me to that Place called Love. Sitting here in the early morning drinking coffee the sun tips these mountains. I look up and watch light find a space through the million spring-fresh mesquite needles, watch it fascinated breaking into a million space-forms, a million color rays spread out from center. These infinite patterns play magic with my vision.

Half closing my eyes, flickering prism colors slide pass the yellow finches breakfasting at their feeder, then through the window spreading these rays fluid-like across the floor. I watch this radiating light in its great ordinariness, making form of the chair, sofa, making color as the dull grey of pre-dawn becomes a lovely magenta, a forest green and it moves toward me making warmth, feeling, making holiness felt.

Entering this paradise of light, color and form, something living inside me leaps -- a life that was not there before. I feel its sacredness, its aliveness, my aliveness.

I know this happens out everyone's window who has a mesquite tree facing east, yet how many times have I missed it? This Who that escorts me to the Place of Love; this Who that is "less like seeing than like being for the first time see, knocked breathless by a powerful glance."

Photo source: fotolia