Listening for the Light

I have been in the habit for several months now of starting my day with a cup of coffee and a reading from Lynn Bauman's study guide to The Gospel of Thomas, called "In Trouble and in Wonder." Many of Jesus' sayings in Thomas are familiar, having been recorded elsewhere in the Bible, and today's was no exception -- it was the passage about not hiding your light under a bushel. But it was also about proclaiming what you hear; listening with your inner ear and sharing that wisdom out in the world.

So I began to think about what it might mean to listen for the light. And I realized that the only time I can claim to do that with any consistency is when I am out with my camera. So this weekend, for example, we were visiting my favorite little island, and I rose early, had my coffee, read my Thomas, and set off with my camera.

When I left the house I had planned to go a familiar route (it's a small island, and there are only so many directions you can go) but as I came down the hill to the intersection where I had intended to turn right, I encountered the wonderful fog you see pictured here. So, at the bottom of the hill, on a hunch, I turned left instead of right. I hadn't been on this particular road for several years, and part of me kept wanting to turn back to more familiar turf, but it felt like I should continue moving forward, so I did, and eventually I came to a beach I had forgotten even existed. I got some wonderful photographs, but for some reason the blogger software isn't letting me add any of them, so I guess I'll shift gears and write instead about what it might mean to listen for the light on a daily basis.

Hmm. So hard, sometimes, to change course in midstream. But of course, that's what this is about: if we pay attention to those inner promptings, it often means we'll be invited to stray from our well-worn thought paths. The loudest example of this in my life right now is still a discovery we made almost a year ago that one of our daughters has Irlen Syndrome. In her case this manifests as a simple reading disability which can be cured by wearing colored glasses. But I should add that she was a senior in high school, taking AP English, when we discovered the problem.

And all I could think was, how did we miss the signs? Why didn't we ever LISTEN when she said reading made her tired, or gave her headaches? How is it that we just assumed that she was just "not a reader," instead of investigating that, instead of wondering why, in a family full of avid readers, there was one child who was different? And why did it take me over a year, after learning of the existence of this syndrome, to realize that it might apply to my own daughter? What might her school experience have been like if we had discovered this, say, six years earlier?

I think this is another instance where mindfulness would be a key. It's so easy to make assumptions and generalizations; as my mathematician husband would say, "to reduce it to a previously solved problem." For the most part, we go about our days more caught up in the workings of our minds than in the promptings of the moment. Certainly as parents, especially when our children are little, it becomes almost habitual to ignore what are often highly repetitive phrases and actions. But occasionally, if we are lucky, the light breaks through in spite of it all.

I am thinking now of a week I spent, almost 2 years ago now, meditating on an island up in British Columbia, under the tutelage of Cynthia Bourgeault. I had had a rough year, I was struggling to get my meditation practice back off the ground, and the eight hours a day of sitting in contemplation were mostly occupied with frustration.

And I remember so clearly: there was a woman in the room who had a chronic cough -- I just assumed it was some sort of low-level cold -- and on Thursday morning she coughed rather abruptly as we were meditating, and the sound somehow propelled me out of my self-flagellation and frustration and into a deeper space filled with color and light. It was incredible, the first time in years that I had been able to experience that "deep-water joy" that meditation can bring.

At the end of the week we went around the room, talking about what the week had been like for us, and she moved us all by explaining that she had Cystic Fibrosis, and that coming to the retreat had been a total act of faith for her, because she had not known if she could handle it. She then apologized for her constant cough, which is apparently a side-effect of the disease. So then, of course, I shared the impact of that cough on my own practice: it served as a sort of jump-start that has kept my meditative motor running ever since.

Which is all to say just this: that we need to listen, to pay attention, to be in the moment, to step out of our egoic preoccupations and into the light. Because, if we take that chance or make that choice, there may be amazing, even life-changing insights and surprises just waiting for us. Like this beach, that picture I promised, which the blogger is finally allowing me to load!