Blessing for the Light
I thank you, light, again, for helping me to find the outline of my daughter’s face, I thank you light, for the subtle way your merest touch gives shape to such things I could only learn to love through your delicate instruction, and I thank you, this morning waking again, most intimately and secretly for your visible invisibility, the way you make me look at the face of the world so that everything, becomes an eye to everything else and so that strangely, I also see myself being seen, so that I can be born again in that sight, so that I can have this one other way along with every other way, to know that I am here. -from The Bell and the Blackbird The wordless thankfulness beneath all the words that make this a 'Blessing' is actually a deeply radical form of silent attention. Out of that silence, we feel thankfulness as just the simple physical experience of being completely and utterly here and completely and utterly being seen. In this place, like being with a person whom we love and who loves us in return, nothing else needs to happen, only what does. DW
The wordless thankfulness beneath all the words that make this a 'Blessing is actually a deeply radical form of silent attention. Out of that silence, we feel thankfulness as just the simple physical experience of being completely and utterly here and completely and utterly being seen. In this place, like being with a person whom we love and who loves us in return, nothing else needs to happen, only what does. DW
Light doesn’t ask for thanks. It just shows up, steady as ever, revealing what we weren’t ready to see until we were cracked open enough to bear it. Not in a sermon, not in a parable. Just a quiet face in the morning, a shape held gently by silence.
Visible invisibility. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the whole mystery doing what it does best—making itself known in the one place we forget to look: right here. In the flicker that shows us not just the world, but that the world is watching back.
This isn’t about being poetic. It’s about being undone in the right direction. Seeing yourself seen and letting that be enough. Not enlightenment. Just presence. Just breath.