The light will overtake the dark.

I awoke in the gray of dawn this morning feeling lonely. The weight of "distancing" felt too heavy. I picked up my phone to see what new things had happened overnight, and my eyes landed on a post from friend of mine.

Jenna, a science teacher at a local school, posted this morning that it is the spring equinox. I had forgotten. She encouraged folks to track the sunrise and sunset, watching the days overtake the nights and continue to lengthen until summer solstice.

I looked out the window to the sky streaked with red into purple that spoke of energy waiting, light returning, and, most of all for me, hope. I realized I needed to be IN the equinox today.  I needed to feel that early morning air, so I stepped out and through the patch of woods behind our house into the open field beyond. As I went, I was thinking about a recent article in "Spin Off" about making something from nothing. The article explored making cording from nature's castoffs.  I sat down and drank my coffee in the middle of a soggy field with a chill in the air. It felt perfect. I gathered a few strands of damp grass and started working. It felt rough between my hands as I first "spun" and then "plied" a short length of cording. This was healing work, heart work, and tactile work all at once. 

Returning to the house a bit later, I felt able to continue this social distancing with a new perspective: This can be healing in more than one way. We can remember how to make something from our cast offs. We can take food scraps and create a tasty broth to nurture our bodies at the next meal. We can take last year's refuse from grasses not yet awake and create cording to hang cheerful sketches or cards from. We can just be kind to each other.  We can do the necessary work to keep our most vulnerable safe and feed our own hearts in the process.  

Now, I'm feeling thankful for friends like Jenna and publications like Spinoff for calling out the things around us that can brighten our day, literally and figuratively, even when things seem the darkest.