{bon mot} monday | night light
This is a historic photo — the first moon shot I’ve taken that didn’t end up looking like a pinhole in a black tablecloth. The August night I snapped it was just as memorable. I’d had a rough day, the kind of day I almost believed staying inside my house (and my head) would actually be the best way to end it.
Instead, I accepted a late-day boating invitation, knowing that being on the water would do what it always does — make my problems smaller and my spirit stronger. As the full moon climbed in the dusky blue sky, I allowed myself to get lost in looking up and laughter and letting go. By the time it illuminated the darkness surrounding us, I was breathing in the light.
When I got home, I looked up a post I’d written about looking for openings when we’re broken. Here’s an excerpt, and you can read the entire “flash of genius” post in rewind below.
Poet/ philosopher Mark Nepo writes about the original meaning of “genius” in THE BOOK OF AWAKENING, saying it was not defined as off-the-charts brilliance and ability, but an “attendant spirit — being in the care of something unseen but near. . . . another way of acknowledging the unseeable stream we all swim in.”
The offensive player in me likes Nepo’s take on adversity — not that we should seek out troubled times {or stomach viruses} to summon moments of genius, but that by “looking for the openings” when we’re “broken by experience, we can find our connection to the unseeable stream we often forget we’re a part of.”
I find an energizing comfort in that and know summoning these words from Nepo will help me be less resistant to all the unknowns of change/ stress/ fear/ uncertainty:
“Perhaps the purpose in crisis, if there is one,
is not to break us as much as to break us open.”
post + playlist | flash of genius with Mark Nepo
on being the change you wish to see in the world
