I have a box where I keep ideas, like props I want to play with some day. In that box sits a light bulb twice as big as my palms.

It’s hard to hold onto ideas, sometimes. They’re fleeting. Unclear. Brilliant but bygone as soon as you try to fill them with details and words.

This light bulb wove its way to the top of the box and the top of my mind, after decades encased with a clip between plastic and cardboard. “It’s my time,” it whispered, then rattled some more.

The sun had barely crept over the mesa when the light bulb woke me that day. At first it asked to simply be held and beholded. It was slippery, that idea. My lack of opposable thumbs didn’t help!

I sought a twist-tie in the kitchen, but it was too short. Then I found a rubberband in my junk drawer, where other ideas toss-tumble and jumble, waiting their turn. Now I could hold that idea more firmly, testing its shine as the sun spilled over the peaks, past orchards and pastures, into my window. I leaned into listening to the idea, so quiet at first.

When have you heard an idea beginning to form? Does it whisper? Does grab your attention with a blinding Aha!!! ???

Snowflake, having finished her breakfast, had questions about this idea. But it was too early to clarify with any coherence, so she glared instead.

“Too bright,” she mutter-meowed.

Truth. Beauty. Love. Good words. Good ideas. But where do we go with concepts like that? We must lift up ideas to be seen, examined, experienced…

Let new ideas swirl in the light of day dawning…

Go toward the light. To the window! To the view!

“Staying indoors is not good enough,” said the idea. “Go outside and play,” it insisted. Ask other bulbs how do they grow…

When queried, “How do you do? And by the way, how do you shine?” the grape hyacinths answered, “We simply bloom from our bulbs into blue. We just be as we do.”

“So that’s how you shine?” I and the light bulb replied, our question mark rising an octave.

“I’m beginning to see,” I said to the light bulb, meaning this idea about shining your light.

Aha! I declared as we brimmed full of photons. We are diamonds in the sky, day and night.

We can twinkle in daylight, we can twinkle in dark. We can dream in starlight and sunshine.

What ideas are coming to life because you’re shining your light?

How are you holding the light that YOU are, not just in your mind but your soul?

We love the idea of YOU and your light! Please keep shining brightly!

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A post shared by Shelly L Francis (@shellylfrancis)