A TERRIBLE-BEAUTIFUL ADVENTURE

A Glimpse of Transcendence
A Companion to Twice Widowed

After You Read

You have just read A Glimpse of Transcendence.

I had gone to Europe looking for things I could recognize. History. Places Darrell and I had known. Work I understood. Instead, some of the moments that reached me were the ones I had not arranged.

At Swarthmore Hall, there was music. There was a woman who noticed that I needed care and placed a blanket over my lap. There was silence in which I stopped trying not to cry. There was light I could feel but could not explain. A few days later, in Great Knott Wood, light moved through the trees again.

I did not have a theory for any of it.

Listening for Something I Did Not Know

My faith belonged to my experience of those days, but I couldn't navigate it with the confidence I once had. I didn't know what to do with what I believed, what had happened to Darrell, or even what I expected from God now. It was confusing.

That confusion mattered because I had often been someone who tried to understand. I researched. I organized. I looked for context. I found words. But something different was happening here. I was not figuring out the new. I was beginning to listen for it.

At Great Knott Wood, I finally spoke directly to God for the first time since Darrell died. I asked only for enough light for each moment, each hour, each day. At the time, I did not know where those words would lead. Looking back, I hear something important in them. I was beginning to tune into life outside my known world.

The light was not a map. It did not tell me what would happen next. It did not make the unknown less unknown. It reached me anyway.

Dappling Light

The important discovery wasn't that the little bit of light was a consolation prize until I could handle more.

The smallness did not diminish its sufficiency.

I did not need enough light to see my future. I needed enough light to inhabit the life that was actually available to me in that moment.

And light isn't the only way I understand that now. It can also be capacity. Energy. Attention. Interest. The ability to make a sandwich. Sit outside. Answer one email. Notice something beautiful. Cry. Do absolutely one thing, because one thing is the size of life I can inhabit right now.

There were times when my life became very small. An hour. A task. A conversation. A patch of light. But small did not mean lesser. It did not mean I was doing grief badly or that my life had become insignificant.

A reduced life is still a life.

Dappling Light asks no more than this: What is illuminated now? What do I have enough light—or life—for right here?

Letting an Experience Be an Experience

There is a temptation to explain a moment as soon as it matters to us. Was it God? Grief? Beauty? A nervous system settling? Coincidence? Hope? Something else? Sometimes there may be good reasons to ask those questions.

But I did not have to answer them before the experience could belong to me.

What it did do was expand my imagination. It reoriented me toward looking—to noticing what else might be there, and becoming curious about a life I could not yet see.

At Swarthmore Hall, I did not know what the dappling light meant. So I did not make it mean something. Then it appeared in another form in the woods. I noticed. That was enough for then.

Perhaps there are things that have reached you that you do not know how to explain. They do not have to become signs, lessons, or promises. You can let an experience be what it was before deciding what it means.

Experiencing Lorrie

The trip was not a continuous ascent into wonder. I collapsed over Darrell's birthday in Oxford. Grief still found me with full force. I could encounter beauty and still be devastated.

By the time I reached Florence, however, another ordinary moment surprised me. I sat alone with a cappuccino and watched people pass. Nothing dramatic happened. I was simply there.

I wasn't announcing that I had found myself. I wasn't describing the woman I was going to become. I wasn't even trying to become her. As a matter of fact, I couldn't even think in those terms.

For a little while, I occupied my own life.

That was enough to notice.

What Is Reaching You?

Perhaps nothing is. Perhaps something is, and you do not trust it yet. Perhaps a sound, a place, a person, a moment of beauty, an unexpected interest, or a few minutes of ease has reached you and then disappeared.

I would not ask you to make more of it than it is.

Only to notice.

A Quiet Truth to Carry

A Scribble of Your Own

Today there is enough light for…