Lux Diei, Dies Lux

I've had this recurring dream.

I'm in a basement with N and H; we're looking for something, and she suddenly takes H and goes upstairs to the kitchen; she shuts and locks the basement door. I have a flashlight with me, but the batteries are weak and it dims quickly. I walk carefully up the stairs and pound on the door with the flashlight--at least it's good for that. It becomes harder and harder to breathe. Finally the door opens and I wake up struggling, gasping for air.

This is possibly the most obvious dream I've ever had. N did in fact take H away and leave me with a partially finished house.

I'm not writing this to wallow, but to recollect. I keep notes on events and feelings, I look for patterns, to make sense... which might well be a colossal waste of time. Yet I recorded a definite trajectory to my life, with the nadir being late April 2011. I remember that Easter, right before my birthday, as a dark struggle. Easter is billed as a season of hope and rebirth--but the seminal event itself was a time of great suffering.

That two week period of despair ended with Fritz's death. After his passing, ironically enough, my life gradually improved. Not steadily, but like a sawtooth, a bleeding, jagged edge upward.

Now that I feel solid again, I have to ask myself, when did the episodes of anxiety and depression stop? Because they did stop at some point--exactly when I don't know. I can say clearly I was healthier and happier one year later.

But it seemed to me there must have been an inflection point, when hope was greater than pain. After much thought and recollection, I narrowed it down to the Winter Solstice, 2011. I remembered a certain day when the sun shines through the window, all the way down the basement stairs, a few days before the solstice.

I was coming up the stairs that day, and suddenly, my head was filled with light; I was utterly blinded. I had walked right into the intense beam of sunlight as I came up the stairs. The ordinary light of day (lux diei) became the Day of Light (dies lux).

It's hard for our animal minds to see True Will at work in our lives. Animals have evolved to notice quick motion, so it's hard for our animal minds to pay attention to subtle, gradual change. We're often distracted, and we tend to confuse quickness with change. True Change is not quick, but sudden. Quick is a deer nimbly sprinting along a rocky river bank. Sudden is a hairline fracture appearing in a glacier before it shears off the mountain. Microscopic and silent, it is no less a catastrophe than the break, and the avalanche is merely a consequence.