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If we are going to survive we have to have the light from within us met by the light from without.  Abused children DO find that light – somehow, somewhere – or they could not possibly survive.  Looking back, where did we find that light?

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I was wide awake around 4 o’clock this morning and started my day as the first light began to flood the world even though the sun itself was nowhere to be seen.  Filling the outdoor animal’s water dish, sweeping lose dirt from my adobe walkway, watering and turning my ever-growing compost pile, until finally, just now right before 6:30 in the morning the first rays of the sun reach over my eastern neighbor’s trailer, and then just over my tall old corrugated steel fence where the rays begin the day by caressing the ferny tips of the tiny little carrot plants my neighbor children brought me to plant a little over a week ago.

Before long these sun rays will be blazing.  They will challenge with their parching heat every green leaf within my yard at the same time that they feed them.

I am thinking about the amazing experience I had as I transcribed that long letter yesterday that my mother wrote down over fifty years ago:  +A ROAD IS A LIVING ‘THING’ – 1959 HOMESTEADING ‘STORY’.  The more I watched the story contained in her words unfold before my eyes, the more I scanned in the photographs and trimmed them up to add in along with her words, the more my body remembered those days on that mountain road when I was seven years old.

As I remembered I felt something happening inside me that I could not name until just now as I watched these sun rays appearing out of the darkness of the night, bringing a new morning to the world on THIS day, THIS day that cannot possibly ever be exactly like any day that has ever passed over this earth in all of its very long history.

What I now can name is that especially because I was a hated, shunned, usually-frightened and terribly abused child, any time that darkness went away even for a little while the light from without that met and touched my light from within helped me to grow by ‘leaps’ and by ‘bounds’.  As I walked my little, growing feet over the virgin land of that Alaskan mountainside something new and different happened to me.

I felt fine.  Absolutely fine.

I see in my mother’s homesteading letters that she often turns her scathing tone to my slowness as I trudged along with my family up that mountain.  “There’s Linda, so slow as always, lagging far behind the rest of us.”  As if I was some foreign albatross, some anchor around everyone else’s neck that dragged down the rest of them no matter what they were doing and no matter what I did.

But as the light from without touched me yesterday as I transcribed that story and remembered every smell, every sight, every tone of the mountainside itself along with what glorious shows of life that lay along the road that led back to OUR mountain along the valley’s floor, I could feel those same sun rays from fifty years ago lighting up my skin on the outside as my soul and spirit lit me up on the inside as clearly as today’s morning sun rays are out there at this instant nourishing those tiny carrot sprouts that rise above the soil’s darkness into their new life.

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At this same moment I know inside of myself that I walked that mountain as slowly as my mother would allow because I was eating it up.  I noticed every step I took, every sound I heard, every wafting sweet-smelling breath of air that swirled around me.  I noticed every twig and branch, every sight of water seeping from the cut earth banks and flowing, the edges of every patch of mud, every freshly cut root from every tree that had been hacked apart by some big caterpillar tractor that had TRIED to make that mountain road.

I heard every bird.  I saw every cloud pass above me.  And for all the meeting of light from without with my seven-year-old and growing light from within that happened to me upon that mountainside I remembered.  I dreamt about those old mountain road switchbacks and the steep walk well into my 40s.  I would travel there in my dreams on a road I knew only I could still find.  And, oh how I grieved for most of my adult life for those days, for those nights.

I grieved for the mountains as the tractors came to strip away the trees and plants to add in the power poles.  I grieved for every freshly cleared strip of land designed to reach someone’s newly built house rising among the trees.  I grieved for that light I felt then, and I didn’t even know it.  Today as I realize how naturally I responded to that Alaskan sanctity of land only newly touched by people, I also grieve for the eagles and bears and moose and beaver that fifty years ago belonged back in that valley and on that mountain before so many people came and scared them all away.

When I returned to that valley and to the place of my childhood last summer I found that the road all the way up that mountain is paved now.  How nice for those who live there, content as they must be with their money, their good vehicles, with the plows that come and clear away all snow trouble before it bothers them.  Nestled in all their houses built on subdivided land they are to me nothing more than signposts of change, of the passing of years, of the continued traveling of people who will go as far as they can around this world until there is barely a single thing left over from long ago and no more far away.

At the same time I am grateful that I was allowed as a small child to be a part of history there in that valley, on that mountain, in that time.  Because there was so very little light allowed to shine for me in my terrified, suffering and very dark childhood, what light came to me in that place, on that land was essential for my very survival.  And here I am today, writing these words, because of my part not only in the horror of my mother’s story that she never truly tells in her written words, but because of the beauty that she also knew — and wrote about.

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Our own life force is as much our light within as it would be for a plant – or for any other creation.  We are designed biologically to respond to light from without.  No matter how abused we have been, as I mentioned at the start of this post, we DID receive light from without that met our own life force light from within.

Because we are members of a social species we are designed first and foremost to respond to the light in other PEOPLE as our emotional-social brain and our entire nervous system-body grows and develops from birth (and before).  Yet for some of us the human environment was far more toxic than light-enhancing.  That could not possibly stop us from responding to nourishing, life promoting influences in our environment no matter what our age.

Perhaps we could see the love and devotion in a pet’s eyes.  Perhaps a stranger offered us a compliment.  Perhaps we became aware of a miracle of nature around us.  Perhaps we loved to run, or to draw, or to cook, or to hit a ball, or to feel damp grass under the soles of our feet or squish wet sand between our toes.

As long as we are alive in a body supportive and nurturing influences surround and encompass us.  They feed and sustain us every bit as much as air, water, food and sleep.  And in that world we were born into SOMETHING and/or SOMEONE DID delight us – or we would not have survived.

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