I carry this quiet room inside me

© 2016 Amber Schley Iragui

because holidays

"And here I am sitting again, yes, sitting again by this faithful lamp, feeling indescribably serene and unhurried. I shall travel this day's path quite calmly and just take a little holiday—my eyes and head are slightly overstressed and overstrained. One must have the patience to do a little less."

–Etty Hillesum

photo © 2012 Amber Schley Iragui

From The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943.

etty and the purpose of this blog

You are always with me.

I am tired today. I fell asleep before noon in the sun, sitting rocking chair watching Miranda and Symeon play on the swings. So many things to think about this week. Bright week. Julia is coming, Nostalgia's birthday, I have one engagement after another. I want to slow time down, ease my mind's constant forays. I remind myself about narratives and their relative importance. I remind myself of me. Etty Hillesum, a woman whose words profoundly shaped my life, wrote:

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.

and

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, the turning inwards in prayer.

I try to inhabit that rest, to reclaim the inner space for peace. And in some ways, I remind myself, this is the purpose of my blog.

I don't know where the stars end and the fireflies begin

Old stories occasionally need revision.

I want to rethink a story so familiar that it functions more as fact than narrative. It's the story about where light comes from. Light, as I've understood it, is always something offered to us from outside. Light is not something of our own making. I'm speaking abstractly here, and yet I want to be perfectly clear.

We receive light.

This presupposition has undergirded literally all my adult thinking, and perhaps my preadult as well. When I create, I merely take the light I am given and reflect it out around myself. When I love, I do the same. Let us say in doing so I carry the light.

I cannot fault the story: and yet I fear the extent to which carrying is understood as a passive act. In fact, I think it has been far too passive in my thinking. This little light of mine. Mine. If the light is mine, I am not merely medium: I am light. The responsibility is not just to take the light and shine, but to become it.

Weeks before she was sent to her death in the camps Etty Hillesum wrote, "God is in safe hands with us, despite everything."

How can I understand this wholly if I do not believe I am the very person with whom God—or let us say light—is safe? If my own light is dependent on me for safety, then to some small measure light itself is dependent on me. And thus, my responsibility is great. For I am light, and though small, must glow.