The cardinal comes at dawn.
His spiky silhouette backlit against a copper sky, the bare branches of our backyard woods his amphitheatre.
He is the first one to sing, heralding the coming of a new day. The moon is still up too, hanging opposite the sunrise, its silver essence shimmering in a sea of pale blue.
Rising early after a fretful night of sleep, I am grateful to have found this moment, for I am looking for the light, and I’m sure you are too.
As the news darkens our days with the corona virus pandemic worsening, the stock market plunging, nasty politics intensifying, and more and more public spaces closing, I find it is much easier to submit to fear and worry, and much harder to muster up courage and optimism.
And yet, in the calm, stillness of the dawn, I am reminded as the cardinal sings and the sunrise casts the trees with a rosy haze, that there is still an abundance of light all around us.
It shines forth in our friends, our family, and our faith. It glows in simple acts of kindness witnessed at the grocery store, in a check-up phone call to a neighbor, in an email offer to help if one gets sick. Its radiance springs forth in the first blooms of white snowdrops poking through the cold earth or in the sweet song of returning sand hill cranes singing and circling overhead.
But mostly the light that we seek is in the fruit of our spirits –“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” And now more than ever, we need to make those lights shine upon each other.
I'm Marnie O. Mamminga and that's my perspective.
