Fireflies

source: michaelscomments.wordpress.com

Twelve and a half years ago, I stood out on the balcony of my third-story-barn apartment in New Hampshire. Just after dusk, I took into my lungs the warm, thick, evening air of June. As I blinked, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. I blinked again in disbelief. Looking down into the field that stretched from the barn to the nearby lake (with a stunning backdrop of hills beyond the water), I saw lights. Hundreds of tiny lights! The ground was moving in fluid pinpoints of whitish yellow luminaries. I recognized these as fireflies, a magical summer night treat I had not grown up with as a child living on the west coast. Perhaps I had seen fireflies once or twice before in the Midwest, traveling on the I-90 corridor during several cross-country driving trips. But to live with them all summer long for the years I was in graduate school – ah! Now this was bliss!

I have been thinking about those fireflies this week. A single small light popped into my memory a few days ago, just as I was having another small insight - a little more clarity - about a difficult life transition in which I am now immersed. Over the next few days, these lights have come more frequently and are filling up my field of vision. They are affirmations. They are crystal clear lights in a field above which the clouds are now moving across the sky, scattering, the stars acting as mirrors to the fireflies below. 

source: Steve Irvine

One of my sisters assured me that just as the dawn comes without fail, so too will this challenging time pass. Another friend assured me that I am strong, especially as I lean into the web of those who love me. A dear acquaintance undergoing intense medical intervention for the sixth month in a row (and who knows nothing of my current situation) emailed these sumptuous words describing her precarious future:  “the edge of my becoming.” My oldest friend reminded me to breathe, to imagine, to consign what has broken to the flames, and to hang onto what is “good and green and growing.”

Yes. There is spaciousness in any situation for the light of dawn; interdependence; the emergence of something unknown and new; air, imaginative creativity, wholeness, growth. Nothing is all darkness; nothing total light. But there is Beauty as the tiny illuminations glow one by one, becoming a community of brilliance and miracles within me.

I live, again, back on the west coast. So I am especially spirited and comforted by the fireflies’ recent presence in my imagination, especially on this particular day of blustery ice and snow, midwinter, thousands of miles and two seasons away from fireflies.

I need this darkness of nighttime to see the fireflies. 

source:  Barry Underwood, johanssonprojects/flickr 

All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.