Firefly Season
On how light finds us
“When we are confined inside
The dark house of suffering
That moonlight might find a window.
When we become false and lost
That the severe noon-light
Would cast our shadow clear.
When we love, that dawn-light
Would lighten our feet
Upon the waters.”
-from John O’Donohue, ‘For Light’
The fireflies are out.
For 20 years, while living in England, I missed them.
This is my second summer since we moved back to the mountains of Western North Carolina, and I still can’t get over it: the magic of a nightly light show made by bugs. I walked the dog down our street last week and watched them dance around us, twinkling against the deep black background of the woods in the dead end. At one point, I stopped and let my eyes adjust to them, and it seemed like there were hundreds - the way you see more stars the longer you look at the night sky.
A few years ago, during the pandemic, I started seeing the world around me in a way I never had before - or maybe a way I hadn’t seen it since I was a child. I’d left church. Survived disease. Found a new way of being and believing that felt like waking up after a drugged sleep. There’s a line from the Bible - from when Paul met God on the road to Damascus - that says “something like scales fell from his eyes.”
I repeated it to myself over and over again, like scales from my eyes, every time I noticed some new way Light had found its way to me:
In the cold of the river on my body, in the laughter of my 75-year-old Buddhist friend, in the stretch of the skin across my back as I lay in child’s pose...in the realization that for all the years I’d heard about the largeness of God, I’d never imagined a God so large I could discover him1 in places I’d once thought unholy.
Wendell Berry said:
“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”
A few weeks ago, on the eve of the summer solstice, I waded into the creek here in North Carolina2 with friends. Just as I’d lowered myself onto a boulder, a duck winged its way between us and landed at the top of a little waterfall.
“It’s a ‘she’!” one friend said, and we teased that she - like me - had probably left her squawking, arguing children behind for a moment to regulate her nervous system in our swimming hole.
Another friend climbed onto the rock behind me, and we leaned against each other, her lithe back bracing against mine. We are both crawling out of dark holes, grappling for a surface that will hold us. Mine, born of a year of medication and surgeries; hers of a broken-down relationship.
I lifted my eyes to the canopy of branches overhead; watched the evening sun dappling through oak leaves; watched the last of its rays on the longest day, stretching their fingers toward the water.
A reminder that, as we reach for the Light, it is always reaching back for us.
for lack of a better pronoun
You may remember I called my weekly swims in England with my Scottish friend Hannah "River Church.” For my stateside creek dips, I’m workshopping the title: “River Church: Satellite Campus.” ;)