Five Minute Friday: Light

It's taken me until now --almost three decades of life, gone by as fast as they tell you it will-- to realize that sometimes I'll have to choose to see the light in my life.

I know others who walk in it so much more easily. They wake in the morning smiling, human embodiments of the sunshine streaming through their windows. But I am one of those whose eyes darken with rain clouds, too often moved ... inches, sometimes feet and feet... by shadows.

The people that tell you it will go by fast will also often suggest that you'll be taught much by the ones who reset the perimeters in your heart; the ones who make it expand 'til it feels it'll burst. And they are right, those people.

It's for them, after all, that I remind myself beneath warm sheets that today is already a good day, no matter what bad dreams might've come in the night. I've a giggling baby across the hall talking to the stuffed bear in her room while she waits for me to scoop her from her crib. I've prancing, silly toddlers filling the kitchen with their laughter while I stir their oatmeal. I've a boy who looks back and smiles at me as the bus pulls away from our house and carries him to school.

It's for him, too, that I summon my own sense of humor when it's been a long day, when he comes in from work with exhausted eyes but still wraps his arms round my waist and murmurs into my neck, "You look pretty." It's light, there, his hand on my back when I move past him to get something from the refrigerator for dinner.

It's light even when the sun sets outside and we can hear the hum and rush of traffic at the busy intersections just beyond our neighborhood, this mess of narrow streets and even tinier alleys, potholed and dusty, marked with tall walls and small stands and markets selling carefully stacked fruit. It's light because it's another blessed day, despite the small rubs of tension and sometimes head-throbbing, soul-squeezing matters of life. I may not wake with a smile but I usually go to bed with one, and it's this reminder of gratitude, still around me like a veil, that rubs my eyes fresh each day to look for the Light, to look for Him in the details.

*
*
*

Linking up with The Gypsy Mama for Five Minute Friday.