Glimmers of Truth – A Journey of Hope
There is a thread running through much of what I write. I have called it different things at different times (lighting the beacons, being the changemakers, the monarch butterflies that take a different route home to preserve the species). I have written about those who go first, who deviate, who carry something forward that others will only later understand. I kept returning to these images without quite knowing why. But I think I am starting to understand.
I have always known things in my writing before I know them anywhere else. Before my body catches up, definitely before the people around me can see it, and before I have language for it in conversation. It arrives here first, on the page, in my poems. Writing, I have come to realise, is my reconnaissance. My brain is a sprinter, moving fast through territory, discarding markers. My body is the backpacker, still on the journey, feeling every mile and carrying the load. The gap between them is where most of my inner life happens. And the writing – the essays, the poems, this blog – is the trail the scout leaves so the hiker knows which way to follow.
But it’s not a map. Nobody gets a map. That’s the thing I want to say most clearly, because I think we can mistake the appearance of self-knowledge for clarity or certainty, and they are not the same thing. The butterflies don’t have a destination programmed into them with coordinates and arrival times. The changemakers can’t see the full shape of what they’re building. The beacons don’t know who will follow the light. We are all, every one of us, just following glimmers. Tiny signals. The next lit thing. I’m realising it’s not a failure of vision, just the honest truth of how a life actually moves forward.
This poem, the one at the end of this post, is the third in an accidental trilogy. It began with Frans Stiene’s beautiful Digging for Truth – A Glimmer of Hope, which I encountered in a writing class and which was a bright light worth following. My response became Digging for Hope – A Glimmer of Truth, written in April 2024. I was understanding something then cognitively, with the scout’s clarity. I wrote about the storm in the mind as a feature of the season rather than an aberration. It was about building a safe, dark, moss-lined place to weather it and the futility of waiting for permanent calm. I knew all of this to be true at that point. I knew it the way you just know a formula; correctly, completely, even at a distance.
What I didn’t know yet was what it would feel like in my body.
This year I found out. The approaching storm, but this time I felt the drag of it, the strange particular relief of going under. For someone who has spent most of their life living from the neck up, this was new and significant and sometimes frightening. The underground chamber was real and the excavation was long and exhausting. But somewhere in the dark, something began to happen that I didn’t have words for until recently. My body, staying still too long, beginning to fossilise. Not broken or injured beyond recovery, but stiffening into the shape of the shelter. Rooting. The ache of staying becoming indistinguishable from the ache of safe.
Then the glimmers came. They always had been coming, I think, left by an earlier version of myself, the one who wrote the first poem, who understood before she could feel. They are like breadcrumbs scattered upward through the dark. Not like a map – I’m terrible at reading them anyway. Just the next warmly lit thing, and underneath the fossilising, underneath the instinct to coorie back in and stay, something else: the knowledge that this place had served its purpose. The moss doesn’t keep. To go back under was to have to dig again from nothing, and the excavation had already been intense and long.
The scout had been here before me, looked at the terrain and returned to leave a note. “You are not built to rot here. Move on.”
This is what I mean by self trust. I don’t mean the confidence of someone who knows the outcome, or the certainty of someone who can see the destination. But maybe more the trust of someone who has watched herself survive, repeatedly, and left herself the evidence. The glimmers are perhaps a testimony as much as a trail. They say: you can do this, even when the body is complaining. Even when emergence is exhilarating and excoriating at the same time, both true at once. Even when every buried instinct says coorie back in, coorie doon, the known dark is kinder than the costly brightness.
This week my body has been catching up. Aching with the stretch of emergence, protesting the unfamiliar light. The scout processed what needed processing days ago and moved on. The hiker is still feeling the miles and the weight of the load. This is how it has always been for me, and I am learning (slowly, tenderly, with more patience than comes naturally!) to honour both. I’ll let the scout range ahead and trust that the body will follow. Track the glimmers even without knowing where they lead. To stand in the sun, aware of the clouds at the edges of the sky, and choose to keep moving anyway.
Not the naked, naive vulnerability I warned against in my first poem, the kind that forgets storm season exists. This is something probably even harder and more honest than that. It is emergence from safe, soft darkness with full knowledge of what that emergence costs. Choosing the sky not because it is safe but because it is necessary – because some things are not built for the underground. Because the light is worth following, even when it asks more than I expected.
I don’t know where the glimmers lead. And that’s ok. The butterflies don’t either. The changemakers certainly do not. The beacons burn without knowing who is watching.
But a part of me left myself the trail and a part of me is following it.
Glimmers of Truth — A Journey of Hope
The burrow built with knowing hands,
moss-lined, dark protection.
Dug deep and left for me here,
When the mind storms, go under.
And so: under.
Learning underground the way the body learns
Slowly, then completely.
The weight of it, the downwards drag.
The strange relief of insulating depth.
But glimmers came.
Breadcrumbs, left by that same knowing self,
scattered upward through the dark.
You are not built to rot here.
Move on, follow me.
The ossified body, fossilising.
Settling into shelter-shape,
The ache of staying
entwined with the ache of safe.
The hatch now ajar.
Sharp air insinuates.
Light, exhilarating and excoriating too, Promises a different warmth.
Every buried instinct saying
coorie back in, coorie doon –
Into known dark, kinder
than this costly brightness.
But the moss will not keep.
This sanctuary has served its purpose.
Returning means more exhausting excavation Through clay leaden ground.
So, tracking uncertain glimmers,
Clouds on the horizon noted, not feared.
The sun reminding the body of this warmth.
Moving on, guided.
