It is just after 7:00 a.m. and 4 year old Nora knocks gently.

“Come in,” I say and she opens the door grinning widely. She takes a few small steps across my tiny master bedroom and “oofs” herself up onto the bed. She flops belly to belly on me and rests her chin on my bony chest.

Nora gazes at the candle flickering beside me on the table. A leftover remnant of the sacred time of my daily early morning alone-ness. She starts to giggle. I have no idea what she is laughing at. Or with. A secret she is privy to and I am not.

“The candle is silly. It is dancing,” she giggles some more from deep within her belly. “Can you make it dance more?”

I blow gently from my place in the bed a couple of feet away. This is a familiar game for us. We usually play it at the kitchen table with Thomas’ candle. And in this moment, we both wait as invisible air traverses the distance between us and the fuel of fire. And then, seconds later, a response. The flame bobs and weaves and responds to the slice in air.

“Does it always stay still?” she asks.

And then she is on to the next thing. Older brother busts in like a cop in the midst of a t.v. show drug bust. His loud overcomes our quiet and she moves onward. But I’m held in quiet watching. Watching her. Watching them. Marveling at their very existence. Marveling at their very fragility.

“Does it always stay still?” she had pondered.

I remember my journaling from the very same morning. From that sacred time of quiet before my house rises. From the early hours of the new day in which I find movement, stillness, breath and fresh words on the page. In that time, Nora’s question was already with me.

Natural light comes and goes. The moon waxes and wanes. Light expands and contracts. Leaving us in brightness to do. Trusting us in darkness to Be. Where we go in the dark is of our choice. To rest, settle, quiet down. To listen. To ride the waves of our Being into life’s quiet pulse. A place so much quieter than the hubbub of our man made daily. The darkness bears no evil. It bears the unseen inviting our trust. Our faith in the return of the light. Our faith in the light’s existence on the other side of the world even we don’t see it here in the blanket of night. Our trust in the pinpricks of starlight into the hollows of our soul. The shafts and dances of vibrant being that slither shine their way into the hidden crevices of our inner night. Of our outer night. One in the same. The heart beats boldly.

Yes, dear Nora. The light is steady. We move and bob and weave and go, but the light stays still. It is always there.

In awe of us,
Rachel