Recognize Your Own Brilliant Light.
{Photo credit: Bernadette Ebanks}
The word brilliant hung around my neck engraved on a key that she gave me.
She gave it to me in a little hotel room, right off the interstate, explaining through lowered lashes why she chose this word to describe me. Two reasons, the first being that she thought my mind was brilliant, and secondly, that the light my spirit emitted was brilliant and bright, and if I was a color, I would be yellow. That was possibly the closest she ever let me to her thoughts as they pertained to me.
In that moment, I felt completely seen, wholly and entirely. It hung around my neck for months and even past the year mark of her giving it to me. It’s a bent, marked key, not shining, not sparkling when it catches the light. It feels weathered, much like my worn soul.
I held on to that key long after I had lived in her light, I wanted to remember that there had been a time she had thought of me in this way. That there had been a moment I felt completely seen.
I wore it defiantly, bravely and openly. When my brilliance was no longer enough to keep her close, I kept in on even in her presence to remind her, my light was still there, still searching for a way to penetrate her shadowy walls. She was too proud to ever mention it, and careful to not stare at it too long as it rested on the notch between my breasts.
It’s been around my neck in the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean and the warm coastline of the Gulf of Mexico, and pressed between my fingers when I wanted and needed to remember this brilliance inside of me. It was my talisman, my hope that one day she would see me this way again.
As life continued to move forward, I was reminded that to feel this brilliance that she had awakened in me, it didn’t have to be reflected at me through her eyes. As her walls heightened, other walls began to crumble.
I began to feel this brilliance in the most ordinary of ways, like in the moment I was pulled aside by a colleague in confidence, to hold space for a grim breast cancer diagnosis, with our eyes spilling over with tears at the injustice of it all, the fear, the hurt, and the pain.
Or when I was at a bookstore in the middle of nowhere in Texas, where an elderly man followed me to the checkout line asking for a book recommendation that would give him comfort after losing his wife of 50 years. It lived in his tired and defeated eyes, sparks of the brilliant love they shared humbled me.
Our encounter ended with me insisting on buying him a book, and a long embrace, him in tears and me reassuring him that his wife is ever-present and close while I pressed my hand to his heart over his crisply ironed gingham shirt.
This brilliance found me again on a lazy Sunday morning on my way to brunch when I passed several homeless people sitting in the park. Instead of the peaceful, decadent and leisurely brunch that I had anticipated, I found myself with dozens of donuts and back in that park, licking icing off my fingers and listening to the stories of strangers, full of so much life and love and pain but mostly brilliant humanity.
I began to discover I didn’t need this proclamation of character hanging around my neck anymore, I didn’t need to prove to anyone who I am or what lives inside of me.
I simply bowed my head and removed my key of brilliance, knowing finally that the brilliance of this world and the people in it will keep finding me, and always will keep meeting my own brilliance, out in the field that Rumi speaks of “out past right and wrongdoing,” it will meet me there.
She never was the giver or the keeper of my brilliant light. It has lived, and always will live, in the middle of me. Perhaps one day, she too will step out into her own brilliant light.
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Squirrelly Muffin can be found close to the water, listening more with age, books and coffee on hand, and has been known to cackle.
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