Feeding the Light

& a nighttime poem to starve the Darkness

This is how we fight against all that breaks our heart in this world:

We feed the Light to starve the Darkness.

Photo by Vadim Sadovski on Unsplash

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You might be familiar with the Cherokee story of the two wolves.

In it, a grandfather explains to his grandson that two wolves live inside each of us—one good, and one evil. When the grandson asks his grandfather which will win, he responds, “The one I feed.”

This story came back to me last night as I got ready for bed. As I massaged my arms with lotion and flossed my teeth, disquiet rose in my gut. My mind had gone back to Israel (where it keeps seeming to land), to innocent lives and big questions and the sickness of feeling small and powerless to help. It was such a juxtaposition with the lavender cream on my skin and the warm, safe children snuggled in their three beds that I couldn’t even hold the two in my brain at the same time.

I began to think of other injustices. Big ones, like a friend-of-a-friend’s brain cancer. Like the chronic pain that’s ravaging the tender, fragile bodies of the ones I love. And smaller, more selfish ones, like the way I was feeling the walls had closed in around me that day and that my brain was languishing from disuse.

But as I remembered the old Cherokee proverb, I began to think that this world has two wolves, too:

The wolf called Darkness, and the wolf called Light.

I thought of how ravenous the wolf called Darkness is—like a spark to dry grass in the desert, it will happily consume everything it licks. It hardly needs fuel to grow.

The wolf called Light though? It requires careful and periodic tending, like a wood stove on a cold winter night. It must be protected and fed often, for it is living in a landscape where the wolf of Darkness prowls. It’s powerful—oh so powerful—but it must be nourished in order to stay alive and offer its warmth to others.

As I snuck into the kids’ bedrooms and kissed them each, one two three, and then climbed into bed myself, I began to think about how easy it feels to feed the darkness sometimes. (Or is the darkness feeding on us?) I wondered what it would like to feed the light, instead. I wondered how it could be done in the broken landscapes of our lives, and our world.

Jesus calls his followers “the light of the world,” and he commissions us to “let (our) light shine before others.” Why? So people will see our light, and, in response, see God’s light (see Matthew 5:14-16).

When we feed the light, we illuminate the world with God’s radiance. This is where the wolf of Darkness goes to die.

So although my brain wanted to ruminate a while longer on all that was wrong in the world—to punch and kick at all the unfairness until it passed out for another day—I wrote this poem, instead. And, in the act of creating something, it felt like I had thrown a log on the fire. It felt like I had fed the Light.

Perhaps this, then, is the way to fight against everything that breaks our heart in this world:

We feed the light and—in doing so—we will starve the Darkness.

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Feeding the Light

by Deidre Braley

I am going
to feed the light.

Because the darkness?
It doesn't need fuel.
It's chaff
that explodes—
spontaneous
combustion
in the hot desert.
Just a touch of heat
will torch it off,
igniting the landscape
with its odd illuminations,
distorting shadows
like funhouse mirrors
and smoke. 

But the light
needs tending,

Like the careful
deliberations
of a wise woman
bent over the flames,
who knows that
it's hard work
to start a fire
in a hearth that's gone cold.
So she returns often
to lay another log
on the embers
and to warm herself
against 
its satisfied crackles. 

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How do you feed the light?

Let’s start a community conversation in the comments below.

Photo by Basil James on Unsplash