Letting Light in

*This was written in June and in draft status until now. Sorry for the delay. I thought it wasn’t finished. I was wrong.


"The wound is the place where the light enters you"

-Rumi


The past year has been a difficult one.. over a year ago we received news that my mother had passed away six months prior. Unfortunately I cannot say the delay in receiving the news was all that surprising - but you go on. Work kept me busy as we had been on almost perpetual overtime. Plus to be honest years ago I had anticipated the possibility of not being informed of her passing.

Then at the beginning of April I was informed that they needed to reduce the workforce at my employer and I would no longer have a job after the middle of May. It was a reduction of one FTE (full time employee) and I was selected to be the one based on the last round of performance evaluations. At first I was more than angry but I can't get too mad about being let go from a job I hated.

Luckily it came about the time we sold our house of ten years and bought a new one. I say luckily because with all the packing and unpacking I haven't had too much time to dwell on it. But the past few days have been difficult as we have been vacationing out of state. for the past nine years we have been travelling to Florida and meeting up with a group of friends. We pay in advance so that we don't have credit card bills to come back to and there wasn't a financial worry with keeping this trip.

The problem is without distractions I couldn't not look at the past years' events - multiple times and from multiple angles in a matter of hours on our drive from Indianapolis to Detroit. (Apparently self mental flagellation is my thing.) But then we boarded our plane and luckily had in-flight entertainment on the back of the seats in front of us.

When I was a child one of my favorite books was "A Wrinkle In Time" by Madeleine L'Engle and the newest  movie based on her book was one of the movies playing. Early in the movie Mindy Kaling's character Mrs. Who says "The wound is the place where the light enters you - Rumi.”

The wound is the place where the light enters you. There is always dark around us, but there is also light. Always. You just have to look for it.

Last fall Riley and I were driving back home from a Target run. She said "Can I ask you something?"
"Always" I replied.
"You had kind of a crappy childhood, right?"
" It wasn't ideal"
"yeah, you had some bad stuff happen."
"Well sure, but why do you ask?"
"Well it seems to me that the people who go through bad stuff like you did aren't very happy people. But you are. Why?"
(Honestly. That level of insight is beyond me.)
"Well a while back I chose to not let that affect any longer how I live my life. Yeah, a lot of bad things happen but I choose not to be miserable o dwell on it. There have been a lot of good things that have happened too. Like you and daddy - the very best things that could have ever happened to me."

Somewhere along the way I've been able to let my wounds show. It's not an easy process. Nothing worth doing is ever easy. If I hadn't though I wouldn't have been able to let light come through the wounds and been given the gift of the wonderful light coming from our daughter.