In my life-long impatience, how much I have missed. Last night, washing the dishes, I really looked at my iron frying pan in the dishwater. The light made visible for a moment a tiny rainbow—a light through water revealing all the colors of life. It is so easy to miss the tiny symbols. Finding them is quite different from the business of trying to hatch up big symbolic experiences. It is RECOGNITION, not PURSUIT, of meaning—recognition of the sacramental, of the intersection of the two worlds, breaking through unsought because one is ATTENDING.
~ from SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON by Helen Luke
Watching for light was her vocation. Light and life were one and the same thing. There would be no life without light; it was the beginning; it was the substance that made things visible, that brought humanity to an awareness of what cannot be seen. It could enhance a thing and make it holy. This she had felt in her life as in her work, a sense of reaching for harmony beyond the human experience through light itself.
~ Ruth Bernhard in GIFTS OF AGE by Charlotte Painter
