I didn’t start out to be a spiritual writer; my first choice was to write humor. But when my seven-year-old died of cancer, it wasn’t funny. Her death put me on the spiritual path and that’s where my feet have gone ever since. I was 35 when she died and now I am old and my words are a mix of light and darkness, for no one on earth is all light!

When I sit down to write my mind is blank. But having studied truth for decades, I have learned that what flows through me when I write is from a well that never goes dry.

This morning the January sun is weak and so am I. The holidays do me in, so I am learning to have silence be my guide until the first robin is seen.

“Who am I” is a holy question, an open door into the light. Stepping cautiously in, I sense the healing presence of humility. I don’t know who I am; I can only give you a bit of surrender. That bit is the widow’s mite; it is what unlocks the secrets of “I am.”

There is no thing as choice in our earth lives; everything is simply happening. No one can start or stop anything of value without surrendering their ego first. Surrender is when life becomes juicy. Before surrender, everything is cut and dried. Nothing is savored and everything is looked upon with a jaded eye.

We must become as little children. That is the solution to the aridity of the heart. I weep openly, as a child would do. The salty tears are tasted on my tongue and in my locked-up tomb of a heart. But a miracle happens as I write; everything I felt I had to do is seen as dross. I turn away from that darkness into the light.

The light is within; it has always only been within. It never mattered how I looked to other people; it only mattered that I was willing to turn towards the light within. And it was then that I hit pay dirt; the tomb of my heart was empty but now the light was everywhere and nowhere. The tomb was just another illusion.

Vicki Woodyard