This little light of mine...

When I was newly sober, and totally confused, I read a book by Gary Zukav called The Seat of the Soul (Oprah later picked up on it, much later, years later, but it was mine first). He talks about emotions determining our level of spiritual growth, that the lower level emotions of hate and fear and pain and anger resonate at a much lower frequency than love and compassion and forgiveness. That made sense to me, since I seemed to be humming all the time. And he talked about light. It seemed to me that my dis-ease was about mucking around in the darkness, one of my own making, but darkness, nonethless. Being in the light was immensely frightening at first, because I knew I could be seen there, warts and all. Seventeen years later, I can still feel the seductive pull of the darkness on occasion, usually when I am in one of my desperately human phases, where mistakes tend to occur with alarming frequency. But most of the time, I try to shine my meager little light out into this scary old world. I got some feedback about that today from my drawing teacher when I presented my portfolio (big fat A, yay!). He said I was the pivotal person in the class this semester, one that he could count on to bring up the level of persistence among the younger people. Wow. That's such grace. And how happy I am he didn't tell me that earlier. It would have spiraled me down into fear of letting him down. What a gift this life is. How seldom I remember that.