Happy Spring! This month on the blog, we’ll be exploring beauty in nature and life.
Light
Weird question: How do you feel about light?
You probably feel like I do. You don’t think about it much until you don’t have it. You walk into a dark room and your hand instinctively searches for the switch. You flip the porch light on for the kid who’s out late. The flash goes off as you snap a picture of a friend blowing out her birthday candles. And is it just me or do you sometimes turn on your phone’s flashlight to read the menu at fancy restaurants?
Here’s an unpopular opinion: I kind of like it when the power goes out. There’s something hopelessly romantic about gathering all the candles in the house, rooting around for the flashlight in the bottom of the toolbox, and getting cozy under a blanket in front of the fireplace.
I love it.
I also love the morning, of letting in the light as I travel from room to room opening up the shades and welcoming the day. Good morning, Bedroom. Good morning, Living Room. Good morning, Kitchen.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Light is universal, the first thing God spoke into being in the story of creation. No one has to tell you that life depends on light.
Phototropism
In Biology, specifically Botany (the study of plants), we talk about light as it relates to something called Phototropism.
It’s a big word that describes how plants develop. Most plants rearrange their tiny plant organs (chloroplasts) to bend toward light in order to maximize food production and grow.
Move a houseplant to a dark corner, and you’ll see its leaves bend in the direction of your nearest window. Or maybe you’ve driven by a field of wild sunflowers and been mesmerized as the sunny rows bow in reverence in the direction of afternoon light. Even the trees growing on the side of a steep hill stretch upwards, directly toward the light.
Light is the fastest known phenomenon in the universe. We will never fully understand it, though we try. According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, nothing with mass can reach or exceed the speed of light. But as humans, we just can’t leave it alone. We want to capture it.
And so we admire the sunrises and sunsets.
And we invent complicated math problems to measure its wavelength and frequency.
Just recently I read that scientists at CalTech invented a camera that can capture light at a trillion frames per second.
We need light like we need air and food and water. Like plants, humans bend toward light.
The Light Inside
We allow light to fill us from the inside out.
My daughter has an album on her phone that’s just a series of sunrises and sunsets, the day opening up wide and clear, all hazy gray and pink and teal and then again as the day says goodnight with sweeping brushstrokes of orange and purple. The canvas of the sky is more beautiful than anything hanging on our wall, breathtaking, and so she opens the camera and finds the light, a moment frozen in time.
Those photos are almost painful in their beauty because they remind us how close we are to darkness, how quickly it covers the day, but how easily, too, the day can wash it away.
As I grow older, the light is dimming, and I constantly find myself saying I need more light.
But what is it I really need?
Do I need more food?
Sustenenence?
Energy?
Guidance?
“The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.”
We claw our way into the light when we are born, and slip gently towards it again we die. Light is the metaphor for all the good within us. In the hours before Jesus’s crucifixion, darkness covered the land. It’s no coincidence that the resurrection happened just as the day was breaking.
So maybe what I really need is more God.
Lord, help me to bend toward your light.