Music Playlist for September 2010
Each week we broadcast six New Dimensions programs four times a day. Click here for this weeks listening schedule.
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Let There Be a Return of Light
by Justine Willis Toms
I was greatly relieved to hear from my friends and relatives in the Northwest in the aftermath of the devastating storm that hit Seattle just before Christmas. My dear friend Brenda Peterson emailed me the following description of the days that followed the tempest.
On behalf of the New Dimensions staff we appreciate your presence and support in our lives and wish you peace, love, and health throughout this New Year.
Let There Be a Return of Light
By Brenda Peterson
Guest Columnist
Friday December 22, 2006
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Promise me that you won’t sleep in that little aquarium bedroom of yours tonight," my best friend Susan called to plead. "Not in this windstorm."
Outside my waterfront studio here on the Salish Sea, the winds battered and buckled salt-streaked windows. Under my palms the glass was shivering. Streetlights swung on their poles like drunken watchmen, shadows refracting in warped waves. "Sleep in your chair in the hallway," Susan insisted. "And call me in the morning so I know you survived the storm."
But in the morning, 80 percent of Seattle was without power, four people had died—one woman drowning in a basement flash flood, others crushed by what seemed a small forest of falling trees in our Northwest evergreen state.
Venturing out from my burrow deep in down comforters before dawn, I surveyed a darkness so dense I did not recognize my own Ali Beach neighborhood. No prismatic Christmas lights, no human constellations pinpointing Bainbridge, Blake or Vashon islands. Only a riot of stars so loud and bright I was astonished; and one ferry boat aglow and gliding on black sea like a ghost ship.
Because I still had an old-fashioned land line phone, I was command central for neighborhood messages and stories for the next three powerless days: There was the student who ran out of the house with her naked baby to spend a day living in their car; the neighbor whose tall fir fell across her front lawn, missing her house by inches; the families gathered around cook stoves and fireplaces, the empty schools, malls, businesses. A Russian friend called to say her extended family was making a "gypsy camp" of her home. Another friend remarked, "This is what it’s been like in Baghdad for six years. We shouldn’t be sending more soldiers. We should send them electricians."
Many of us were without power for three to five days. Some of us are still without heat or light, awaiting the diligent and sleepless electric crews. Everybody has a glazed look. We can’t focus. Without light, we have less physical energy. We’re weirdly insulated, but it has nothing to do with warmth.
The outside world seems far away, without Internet or television; we are listening more than looking. Radio is once again our lifeline, our hearth, as we walk around draped in sleeping bags, miner’s lamps like Cyclopes eyes adorning our foreheads, our houses ablaze with batteries of candles like altars to what is unseen.
Without our human power, our bright, but artificial daze, we realize just how much is invisible—always just outside our vision. We remember that 90 percent of the universe is dark matter, that there have always been more stars shining down on us than our electricity lets us see or hear—multitudes of planets and galaxies beaming us the histories of their light, if we can find stillness to listen.
On the fourth powerless day, my phone rings with a tinny bell tone from an old movie. "Oh, at last it’s come back!" Susan exults.
In her voice is the exhausted relief, the endurance of our ancestors who also hunkered down during these darkest days of the year, longing for illumination, for the bright blessing of winter solstice—for the return of all light.
Brenda Peterson is a novelist and nature writer. She is the author of Sightings: The Gray Whale’s Mysterious Journey and the novel Duck and Cover. She’s co-authored with Dr. Toni Frohoff the novel Animal Heart and is the editor, with Linda Hogan, of the anthology Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism, and Awakening. Her appearances on New Dimensions include Program #3062 Navigating Nature Naturally, and program #3001 The Soul of a Dolphin.
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