Many moments of light this weekend, but less time to turn them into blog entries. On Friday, I traveled with two friends out to Kansas for our 18th annual Joy Luck Club gathering. We met our friend, Christina, in Kansas City, Missouri, after traveling ten hours from Goshen, played some mah jongg in our hotel room and did some sight-seeing the next day before driving on to her home in Salina.

It was snowing when we left Goshen, and we saw a couple remnants of accidents on the road near Chicago, so it was a relief to arrive safely. And traveling through Missouri, the combination of colors created by the late afternoon sunshine and golden dried grasses, brown branches, white snow, blue sky and blue shadows lifted my spirits.

Saturday we spent some time in the contemporary art museum in Kansas City. I liked the glass sculpture by Chiluly and its shadows.

And from a little farther away, I was intrigued by the way the artwork reflected in the floor.

And this photo by Michael Schultz was a spark of light -- it's a photo of a decaying ammonia factory in Belgium,with green moss and ferns growing on the floor. I also like his quote above, which you may not be able to read: I believe the camera can produce an image that. . . enters a realm of heightened reality.  It struck me as fitting well with what I'm doing with this blog.

"Sparks of light" is a very visual phrase. I've been wondering what the equivalent would be for the other senses, prompted in part by the strong clean scent of pine that came from this pile of recently cut wood, a very definite olfactory spark of light.

Whiff of fragrance, perhaps. Chords from the music of the spheres. Sounds of silence. Tang of....what? And for touch I'm not even coming up with a feeble attempt.

Inspired by the whiff of pine fragrance, today's photos are of scents, so you'll have to use your imagination.

This breakfast grapefruit manages to include some sparks of light as well.

Without the scent, this one may be harder to identify -- a bowl of dried lavender buds and wave-smoothed beach glass.

Dutch apple pie -- apple and cinnamon and butter and sugar scents.

And having posted these, I'm amused that there seems to be a strong circular theme, as well as the fragrance theme.

I looked out my study window today and saw some suspiciously spring-green tips. Closer inspection revealed that, yes, some of my daffodils are feeling the siren call of the 40 degree weather we've been having.

A tour of the yard revealed that while most things are still safely hibernating, there is at least one early bloomer in the bunch.

The winter storm watch the weather station has declared for tomorrow may come as a bit of a shock. Fortunately, these plants are adapted to the vagaries of the winter and spring dance, and even though it doesn't usually begin already in January, they'll cope. Those bursting buds will just need to wait a little longer.

It was a lovely, sunny day, but due to my schedule there was only a brief time in the late afternoon when I could get out to look for sparks of light.

I decided to give myself the challenge of seeing what I could find in the blocks just north of here, where 10th Street runs past a couple factories and the alley runs past parking lots and dilapidated back yards. Not the most scenic area, as you can see above.

Still, there were things that caught my eye, like the landing of the small bird on the leftmost wire - something about the bird blithely making itself at home amidst the complexities of the wires tickles my fancy.
    All God's children got a place in the choir,
    some sing low, and some sing higher,
    some sing out loud on the telephone wire. . .
    (hear a clip of Bill Staines performing the full song)

And there were the lines and the light on this stump.

An acquaintance came biking past as I took this photo and asked if there was something special I was photographing. "No, I just liked the red ribbons," I told her, and then as she biked away, felt like I should be explaining that it was something about the festive air of the bows decorating a gray fence on the edge of a bland parking lot, not that I'm especially attracted to red plastic bows. But ah, well. Sparks of light came in many forms.

I do seem to be drawn to shades of red, whether in the near ground-level berries in the photo above or in this towering, glowing bittersweet vine, or the closeup from the same vine below.

Epiphany was January 6, but I'm still pondering it and probably will continue to do so, because watching for sparks of light is an Epiphany practice.

In a short reflection piece for Alive Now! called "Looking for Christ in the Boring," Sarah Parsons gives the short version of one of her "ordinary, boring days" and then retells it, with an eye for the Christ moments she encountered.

She writes: These Christ-sightings are an Epiphany message for me. Christmas says Christ is here, born into the world. Epiphany says it's up to us to find him, and it may not be easy. We may have to walk a long road, follow strange guidance, and encounter Herod-like dangers. . .When I expect Christ to enter my day with lots of fanfare and, at the end of the day, bemoan that 'nothing happened,' I wonder if I am getting Christ wrong somehow. Christ originally entered the world in pretty ordinary human style, even more humbly than most humans do."

Our invitation is to stay awake, pay attention, notice the ways that God is present in the place where we are, in all its ordinariness.

In what started out as a gray Indiana day, my attention was caught by the changes in the sky, from the midday sun beginning to break through the clouds in the picture above, making me think of a dark-winged angel, to the blue skies and fleecy skies of the later afternoon, catching the light of the setting sun.

There were other moments of light as well, of encounter and relationship, but those are not always mine to share. Read Sarah's full article for her examples of ways she encountered the light of Christ in her boring day, once she opened her eyes to look.

I took my walk by the dam in the middle of yesterday's warm, sunshiny day, and took delight in finding dried leaf sculptures, and other chance compositions. Here are a few.

The Twelfth day of Christmas arrived with swathes of gauzy, pink clouds strewn across the pale blue sky, as though dawn were preparing for the arrival of twins, male and female.

Today is the Feast of Epiphany, from the Greek word epiphaneia, meaning to appear. Related words are epiphaino - to give light, to illuminate-- and epephanen, to be revealed. A very fitting day for searching for sparks of light.

For the Eastern Orthodox, Epiphany is also known as the Festival of Lights, because believers would bring many candles to celebrate the baptism services held that day.

The Western Church celebrates Three Kings Day, and the arrival of the magi, the wise men from the east, bringing gifts and paying homage to the infant Jesus.

The afternoon sunshine came streaming in our south living room window, bounced off the shiny library book on the coffee table, and created some intriguing light and shadow play with my pewter nativity scene.

And the glory shone all around....

Sunset arrived as I began work on this entry, and the pink swathes returned.

I've been enjoying the sunshine streaming down the last couple days, though due to other commitments and the challenges of taking photos when the temperature is below freezing, I haven't been able to explore sun on snow as much as I would have liked.

At least my spirits can be lifted by the sight of sun and snow from inside the house -- though the snow has been melting since this photo, as the temperatures climb into the 40's.

Given that we are still in Christmastime, this 11th day of Christmas, I've been enjoying the way the sunshine brought out these traditional Christmas-y colors.

And a different sort of spark of light --
On JRR Tolkien's birthday, January 3rd, Garrison Keillor included this story about him on his daily Writers' Almanac. Tolkien was a professor of English Literature at Oxford, and one day when he was grading exams, he found that a student had left blank an entire page of the exam booklet. In that empty space, Tolkien scribbled the sentence "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." He went on to develop that into a story he told his children and, eventually, his book The Hobbit.

I'm enchanted by this snippet. What if there hadn't been a blank page just then? What if Tolkien hadn't let his diligent prof-grading-exam identity drift away? What unsuspected delights might come popping out for us, if we find a little time and space in the midst of our everyday duties, and let our creative selves playfully scribble a mysterious sentence, a joyful doodle, a half-heard tune?

Yesterday we spent the afternoon with a group of friends for an annual New Year's journaling session. We each have a list of questions drawn from Elizabeth O'Connor's Letters to Scattered Pilgrims, and we settle down with our journal or laptop and work our way through them, reflecting on the year through a variety of lenses: high points, significant people, significant books or movies or pieces of art, new discoveries about yourself, regrets and learnings, dreams, themes, ways you were gift to someone else, and so on.

We take about an hour and a half looking back over the past year, take a snack break and do some sharing, and then move on to a second section, looking ahead to the coming year.

One of my highlights last January was a trip to Japan as part of an Amish and Mennonite quilting exhibition for the Tokyo Quilt Festival. Yesterday, getting ready for the journal session, I spent time looking at photos of the trip. I thought I'd post a few memories, sparks of light from last January.