Bringer of Light
A crown of candles, a mosaic, a fox to follow through the darkness
It’s cold in these darkest days of winter, the land having turned its face away from the sun. But you are warm here, sleeping heavily under your down quilt, your worries scattered lifelessly about the rug where your mind dropped them. In your dream, you are following a white fox who trots through the frozen forest, leading you further and further away from the safety of your cabin. Where is he taking you? The way he darts between the trees, his thick fur lit only by the moon, makes him disappear for whole minutes. Many times you think you’ve lost him and begin to panic, only to glimpse the soft plume of his tail leading always just ahead. And now, what is that singing in the distance?
A sound dissolves one dream into another as candlelight fills your bedroom. It’s the children who are singing so beautifully. Do you know them? Yes, they are the same ones who, during the day, bicker over toys and leave clumps of porridge on the table, but are now revealed as children of light. Leading them is a woman wearing a crown of fire and carrying a tray of coffee and yellow buns. The smell of saffron is the smell of the sun. She invites you to taste it.
Fitting, I think, that my first post here at Bright Shards is on St. Lucia Day, a holiday my Swedish American family honors each year. In Scandinavia, Lucia day is celebrated on December 13 and combines pagan traditions from the old Norse times with the Christian legend of the martyr St. Lucy. Women and girls dressed as Lucia wear crowns of candles, bringing light and hope into the darkest time of the year around the winter solstice. St. Lucia Day is, perhaps, my favorite holiday, and one of my son’s favorites too. Now my childhood memories of walking down candlelit roads with my school friends in the predawn, singing, and of having candlewax ironed out of my hair, are overlayed by new memories of baking with my son and singing with him as he wakes my husband and my parents next door with a tray of golden buns and ginger cookies.
Fitting, because my vision for Bright Shards is as a place for light to gather in dark times. A place where individual candles pool their brightness and heat to make a stronger glow. I greet you now, as we’ve just completed our first year of programming at School for Living Futures earlier this month, and as — just yesterday — I approved the final copyedits on Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal, which will be flying into the world in February. This seemed an apt time of transition to pause, and then begin anew.
As a poet and writer, part of my practice is to gather, like a crow, the shining words, ideas, and images I find in the grass. And through my work with the School for Living Futures (SfLF), I now have the regular opportunity to bring together some of the amazing, climate-engaged work of artists, scientists, activists, writers, and scholars taking place all around us. The bright shards I will offer you here invite an alternative to the ongoing narratives of doom, apathy, and inaction on one hand, and of business-as-usual (buy more stuff!) on the other. I offer you these glints of candlelight so that we might co-create a new mosaic with them, an image we might carry (and which might carry us) through the darkness.
Thank you for walking with me.
Sarah Rose
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