August’s theme is: “Light & Dark”

The sun filters through overcast clouds and glows through the window panes as I sit another day here in my writing room. Most days have been bearable, productive even, as I tread through the pandemic -only leaving home when necessary. When I was furloughed from my teaching job, I spent the spring and then the early summer days surveying my gardens and weeding around seedlings and digging in the dirt to make room for new plants. I wrote daily and in mid-May I completed my first novel and then spent another month editing and revising before I started a second novel.

Then, the heat came. The thunderstorms rumbled and tumbled through, carrying the humidity with them. The dog days of summer had arrived, unruly and off-leash. The sweat from my body made me feel water-logged and my inspiration and creativity became elusive and it took more energy, more than my body wanted to exert, to rally and find it again to produce a blog post, rewrite a scene, or sketch an idea into my notebook.

Now, the sunshine too is elusive, yet the heaviness inside me remains. “I’m bored, and sad,” I cry to my husband as I put my head down on the dining room table. Tears seep into my thin sweatshirt (for now I am cold in the air conditioned house, but uncomfortable in the outdoor heat) and I reach for a tissue. A few hours before he came home from work, I had received two rejection emails: one from a literary agent and one from a job prospect. Both were long shots and I knew it going in, had even prepared myself for the high possibility of rejection as well. What I wasn’t expecting was my heavy emotions to bubble up from the murky waters inside my unconscious, shattering my fragile ego.

Earlier in the day, I surveyed our yard to gauge the damage from yesterday’s severe thunderstorm that brought heavy winds and sheets of rain to our doorstep. Broken limbs with brown and green lichen littered our acre land. Garden phlox bent over at the waist, their pink heads touching the grass in quiet supplication. A tender shoot from my dahlia broke off in my hand as I gently tried to help it stand up. All of my gardens looked wrecked and ruined. I pushed the dirt back in around the fallen sunflower near our shed and I nearly stepped on a small frog about the size of a silver dollar. His brown speckled body froze and I watched his rib cage move rapidly in and out. I shooed him gently away and he hopped into the tall grass that we haven’t been able to mow for a week now due to the daily deluge.

I picked up the broken limbs and branches for over an hour. My sweat felt hard earned and my body no longer ached from hours of discomfort and anxiety. For each branch I tossed on the growing pile, I tossed away a thought riddled with self-doubt about my writing ability or my value in the work force. The smell of wet dirt and sweet wood connected me back to my earthiness. Mushroom umbrellas appeared to open right in front of my eyes. The sun peaked from behind a nondescript cloud for a moment and I stood up and saw my backyard teeming with life: yellow sulfur butterflies flitting around the bedraggled cosmos; another speckled frog (this time the color of the red clay earth) hopped alongside the sticks I was collecting; a hummingbird visited the drying garden phlox; and even a honey bee found a little sweetness in a late blooming clover that had been hiding in between unruly grass. The light had broken through and everyone of us got busy doing what each one of us does: frogs hop, butterflies flit, bees buzz, and hummingbirds hum. And I try to somehow make art out of their beautiful lives they share with me.

I’m often reminded of the phrase: “No mud. . .No lotus.” The lotus flower can only bloom once its roots, all underwater, are fully rooted into the muck. The darkness and the murkiness, where hope for any type of life seems dubious if not ominous, is where the idea of the flower begins. As the flower emerges from the plant, the same dark waters cleanse the growing bud. Once it makes its way to the surface, the flower then opens to the light. Would I have created anything today, or any day, without rooting into those parts of myself and fishing out a piece of writing to offer us “jewelry for the mind” (a phrase the musician and writer Tom Waits coined to describe his writing)? Would the butterfly’s wings have been as bright and cheery to me had I not had the experience of feeling sad and alone? Would the scared frog have pulled on my heartstrings and opened me up to more compassion had I not been tuning in to my empathy for the fallen sunflower?

I have no definitive answers to those questions. I just know that when we open our hearts and minds to the light that is around us and within us, we can blossom into something new if only for a moment before we dip back and hide in the shadows of another day.