Enough light to find your way by. In his sermon a few weeks ago, which my husband and I watched on YouTube, the minister of our church spoke of an Icelandic term that I’d never heard before.
Ratiljóst
He told us it means having “enough light to find your way by.” He likened it to other words from Northern Europe that have served a good purpose among us in recent years in terms of expanding our sense of how to live. Like “hygge,” the Danish word for coziness. Or “lagom,” the Swedish word for “not too much, not too little; just right.” Or “sisu,” Finnish for grit in the face of great adversity.
Ratiljóst, enough light to find your way by.
This word, or to be more honest, this definition, has been rolling around in my mind ever since I heard it. Enough light to find your way by. Isn’t that the longing of each day? Particularly in these days of Covid stress and fear and grief, these days of political angst, of economic angst, of division. Enough light to find your way by.
It reminded me of a time when I spent a couple 10-day periods on Whidbey Island on Puget Sound for graduate school residencies. To go from the building that served as the student center to the houses where we stayed, you had to walk through a wooded area. There were no lights on the path and at night it was pitch dark. Being already in a rural area with no nearby background urban lights that could share their glow, walking that path alone at night was unnerving, even if walking with a friend. The span was only that of about a long city block but in my memory it was much longer. We used the light from our flip phones—it would be several years yet before smartphones with built-in flashlights—to help light the way, but the faint light that shown from a phone’s open face barely illuminated where our next step would land, let alone what was on either side of you in the woods or a preview of what or who was approaching. Enough light to find our way by, but only just enough. If I’d known the Icelandic word then I may have been tempted to go to the nearby town some afternoon while there and have it tattooed on my hand as a reminder of all that was truly needed. Just enough light. For now, I’ve written the word on an index card and pinned it on my bulletin board above my desk. Maybe it’s a word you’d like to consider as well. Ratiljóst
~
The mention of light came again in the days after that sermon, at the presidential inauguration here in the US. The part of the inauguration event that I want to call to your attention has nothing to do with whether or not you voted for the man who is now our president. The part of the event I’m calling your attention to is when Amanda Gorman, the 22-year-old inaugural poet spoke. Two lines soared for me at that moment, and I quickly wrote them down:
"There's always light if we're brave enough to see it.
If we're brave enough to be it."
Let’s be light for each other, shall we? I need your light, and maybe you need mine. When walking through the dark wooded area I described above, it was all the better to walk with a friend by the light of two flip phones rather than one.
~~~
[Photo: taken of light on a nearby lake just after the new year. The winter solstice is now behind us and the days are getting longer. Thanks be to God.]