Step into Starlight...

...and you just might land on the Moon!

Dear Friend and Fellow Maker,

I’ve been tossing around the well-loved saying by Norman Vincent Peale, “Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” I have held this quote dear in years past as both encouragement to keep striving for my dreams and also comfort when it doesn’t seem to happen. But now I’m wondering if this phrase misses both the stars and the moon for me in my middle years. And I’m resetting the phrase to fit both my experience and also to light the way forward.

As I look back over years of making, of once wanting to be a full-time painter, then specifically a portrait artist, then a fiber artist, then a children’s book author, then a tapestry weaver, etc…I see a common theme. I thought I was aiming to achieve a particular thing. But what I ended up doing was taking the spark or star that was twinkling within sight, gathering it into my creative net or imagination, and making something of it, however big or small it might be. This ongoing path of following fireflies, catching twinkling stars that are popping up all around me, has been a much more embodying way to be creative.

It reminds me of a quote by C.S. Lewis:

“I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.” ¹

I am far too often looking at the beam in my mind’s eye. My brain tells me I have missed the mark, that I’m not achieving or accomplishing what the Beam looks like. But when I step into the Beam of Light itself, when I’ve gathered the small stars into my heart and looked through the light they give off, I am enchanted and have at once become the thing I was aiming for as well as indwelling that which I have so longed for and reached for.

It seems a small shift doesn’t it? What would it mean for me to stop looking at the Moon, to cease the constant longing and striving for what seems just out of reach? How might I step into the stars that snap, crackle and pop all around me? Or maybe the lights just steadily shine, low and cool, barely bringing attention to themselves, the ordinary, the hum-drum, the mundane. What would happen if I made something of what I see along the beam, instead of striving to capture the beam itself? Does any of this make sense?

Regardless of sense, I rest easier in this beam-living, star-infused life. Striving can take a nap. Frustration over “interruptions” can fall away. And all that the light is illuminating around me, “this” and “this too”, can be something at which to marvel, to fashion, to open, to unwrap, to gaze into and along, to revel in, to cherish. What can you, can I, open our eyes and hearts to today that is right here at hand, not way up there far away on the Moon?

The wild thing is… and I truly have and do experience this from time to time… the wild thing is that as I step into starlight, gazing along the beam, I find that my feet have been on the moon all along. Crater-walking sometimes lands me in deep dark places where it’s tough to see starlight. But I find the moon right underneath my feet, or maybe it’s France.² The thing I’ve been aiming for has been here all along. I just have to step into it, rather than striving to attain it.

Wishing you a beam of Light to step into today!

Jennifer

1. To read the entire article by C. S. Lewis titled “Meditation in a Toolshed” go here.

2. A previous blog post from 2012 titled “France Beneath My Feet”.