Want to know the most important thing I’ve learned about peace?
It’s that darkness is only made scarier by trying to outrun it and that you can always find the light through compassion.
Light is in the letting go. It’s in the soft, open hands and heart. It’s being here and connected. And choosing to move on fully from the past. Carrying the lessons learned, not the weight of the trials we’ve faced.
That’s light. As in light, free, graceful, easy, and light as in the soul, energy, inspiration, healing.
It’s found in a well-placed yes and no. It’s the courage to love ourselves fully. Light rides on the backs of the tiny decisions we make every day. It’s found in the little imperfections. In ourselves and our circumstances.
Like daylight shining through the cracks in an impenetrable fortress, it seeps in and makes things so much brighter than we could have ever planned for.
Light is at once warming, nurturing, enlightening, and powerful. And it’s so gentle. It will always find a way through without force or pressure. Only ever love.
We can try all the ways in the world to avoid the dark and hold on to the light. We can do the perfection thing, the building walls thing, the making excuses thing. We procrastinate, avoid, people-please. And, for all our efforts, it’s only then that the dark feels impossible to outrun.
The things we do to shield ourselves from it, to never be hurt again, never have a broken heart, never see our darker side, never appear weak, sometimes drop us into the darkest place of all. It’s this kind of dark that makes us fear our own shadow. We become afraid to let go, afraid to be open, and so afraid of hurting.
But fear is not the answer. Once you know where to look, the light is only made visible by the dark.
It’s in the dark that we can learn to show love to our darker side. It’s where we realize that life is short and brilliant and beautiful.
And it’s in finding our way through the dark that we learn to soothe and love ourselves. It’s how we learn to soften and understand. We learn what we value, who we are, and appreciate the strength in tenderness.
So, when you find yourself in the dark, breathe, light a candle for yourself, and hold on to it until the morning.
These words taken from There, I Might Find Peace sum up the hardest but most powerful lessons I’ve had to learn about finding peace within myself. It was in falling that I learned to rise and in the dark that I discovered that light and dark are one in the same when we can approach them both with love. When we can listen to our darker sides with love, we discover that it’s just a side of us struggling to find peace. I used to view this part of me as flawed, but now I know it’s only the side of me that needs my love the most.
Thanks so much for coming along for the ride this week. I hope you’ve felt the peace, love, and strength rising up in you.
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