On Daylight OR To Have and to Hold (A Lover of the Light)

It's been a day (week, really) of songs about light. Worming our way from a conversation last weekend about Snow Patrol's Crack the Shutters ("as the rays tangle up around your face and body...cause the daylight seems to want you just as much as I want you") and the darkened days that song pulled me through, all the way to tonight and my favorite Mumford and Sons video and the way he reaches out his hands to play with the sunlight he feels but can't see. And the way we think about light, as a thing to be seen, to be caught and refracted and reflected and shone into dark rooms and dark mazes at a fall festival for the four year old clinging to your sweater sleeve and tripping up your feet and scared - and it's true. But it runs deeper, more than x number of dimensions- the way that light tumbles through cracks in shutters like flowers up through cracks in pavement. The way it strains towards you to fill up every crevice and tangles up around you like waking up to slept-in-late sunshine under your eyelashes and bed sheets tangled around your ankles. The way it slips like sand between your fingers to rejoin the rest. The moment you step out, light accepts you, takes you in, an honored member of reality, part of your surroundings, earth below your feet and light swimming around you and pulling at you and holding you down. It believes that you are where you're meant to be, authorized personnel to clump about on planet earth and do stuff and make art and say the right words and say the wrong words and breathe air and laugh and touch things and like things and dislike things and learn to ride a bike. The daylight is warm on your face. You are welcomed, accepted, protected, believed in, beloved. Take comfort. Have heart. Be brave. 'Go boldly in the direction of your dreams.' Forgive yourself for existing, the sunlight already has. Accept yourself as you are, but expect yourself to be the best that you can be. Be kind to yourself, beloved child of the God who hung the stars in the sky and gave his very life for you so that by His light, the Light of the World, darkness may be driven back for good. "Look to the future and stand in the sun."