The light across the pond.
I follow a beam of light, like moonshine over water or the rising and setting of the sun.
September 28, 2023 My daughter Julia gives Gary, (her step-father) a lamp for his birthday. It’s a cube of softly polished wood topped with a clear filament bulb. When illuminated, the filament glows, casting a warm amber light. Gary chooses to locate it on top of a speaker in his music studio—across the pond from our house.
It glows like a beacon, through our bedroom window, when we wake in the night. It greets me in the morning. It is enormously comforting and I never take it for granted.
October 6, 2023 My friend who lives on Lopez Island emails. She is excited about a newsletter from David Spangler, an author and spiritual philosopher who she admires. He wrote that whenever he consults his non-corporeal guides about what he might do to help the world in this time of crisis he always receives more or less the same answer.
Be light.
October 7, 2023: Hamas invades Israel triggering another brutal, and seemingly inevitable war.
My friend, artist Barbara Todd, once made a series of large dark-hued quilts which she called Security Blankets. She sewed them from men’s suiting materials appliqued with shapes of men’s suits, missiles, bombs, warplanes and other hardware of war. The hand stitching invokes hand made quilts of our ancestors.
On her website Barbara states: Each quilt points to the unresolvable irony at the heart of current social and political life, the conflict between power and human values. These quilts are profoundly moving, menacing and yet tender.
In the years since Security Blankets, Barbara has veered away from directly confronting this conflict but her investigation is ongoing. Coffin Quilts incorporates nineteenth century designs of coffins. A Bed is a Boat invokes the boundary between wakefulness and sleep and is inspired by the drawings of young children, as is her next body of work, Heaven and Earth. A work in progress is her re-imagination of the Bayeux Tapestry, a seventy meter long embroidered canvas which depicts the story of the conquest of England at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 AD.
She leaves out the battle.
Recently Barbara has been working with colour.
There is a rectangle of sunshine yellow on her studio wall.
November 3, 2023 my friend who sent the David Spangler newsletter dies, in hospice care, at her home on Lopez Island. This date is twelve years to the day since we met, on Whidbey Island. We were participants in a yearlong program called Soulcraft. The women who took this program, and the guides who taught it, have since become a circle of friends. Her spirit name in the group was seed.
Seed, I’m still ruminating on the challenge, Be Light. You and I both like this ideal, and also the word, ruminate. Be Light. There is a way in which this suggestion might be taken badly, as disrespect for those who suffer, as disregard for the tremendous shadow which hovers over the world at this time. And yet, it seems to me that everything exists simultaneously, the light and the dark. It depends which way you turn your head. To turn your eyes to one is not to obliterate the other. Nor can the other be obliterated. What would the world be like if we really took this challenge to heart? David Spangler went on to write:
I asked what that means, how to be light, and got this response: Joy. Hope. Love. Laughter. Optimism. Patience. While you do whatever you do, be the Sun. Light actually is transmuting, transforming, and restructuring human circuitry. It is not nothing! Holding its resonance is supporting the reworking of the human mind/body. It is a long game. But it is real.
Understand you are an electrical transformer.
David Spangler, Lorian Society Newsletter
November 4, 2023 our Soulcraft group meets on Zoom to wake seed. One of the guides says:
a seed of light has dropped to Earth.
In her life seed (she didn’t like it capitalized), was a wonderful ceramic sculptor and passionate environmental activist. She tackled the US Navy with their program of testing Growlers over the San Juan Islands. (The Boeing EA-18G Growler is an American carrier-based electronic warfare aircraft).
Seed was indeed a beacon.
Lest this get too solemn. Here’s a video Gary made of the pumpkin I carved for All Hallow’s Eve this year.
Lovely to hear from you Carole! Sending love to you and Gary. Heather W xxxxxx
I took from your post the invitation to like the word ruminate. For so long I have seen this word as a symptom of depression and an express failing, to dwell too long.