I took a walk around the loop trail at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters Friday morning after our last 4 inches of snow. It was early. The forest was still, the snow lay undisturbed, and the shadows were long. It was altogether wonderful.

This image needs to be viewed full screen to see what I saw in it. It was the light coming through the sharp drift of snow on the branch that caught my eye, but then, as I lifted the camera, some minor movement higher in the trees…maybe just a branch flexing as the sun touched the cold center of it…shook loose a million tiny frost crystals which fell through the light. I was not at all sure that the camera would catch them…or even the primary light through the snow on the branch…but it did. A little processing in Snapseed clarified the effects.

And for the Sunday Thought: I woke this morning from one of those dreams that feels like it has larger significance, and lay there, as I sometimes do (as you probably sometimes do) in that plasma state between waking and sleep where the mind examines the dream and pushes it out along its streams of significance…making sense of it…or, as it sometimes happens…rearranging our sense of reality just enough to contain the significances of the dream. I had reached one of those points of singular illumination, where many things that I had thought and done before were connected by a web of light, and where the web stretched at least a little way past where I am…before I shook off sleep completely and turned over. I then lay there and wondered what I was supposed to do with it? How could I share it? How could I even begin to weave a conscious web of insight and words that would convince anyone else…or even connect with anyone else’s experience enough to be understood? And yet I felt, and still feel, a deep conviction that I am supposed to share…not the message of the dream, specifically…but the message of my life so far…that sharing it is what I am tasked, asked, and expected to do.

About then was when I remembered that it is Sunday. That it is is time for the Sunday Thought. That my first task of the day would be to find an image from the past few days to post that would carry the freight of a Sunday Thought.

This image. This is one of the places where the spirit shows through…where it is more than usually obvious that life is matter animated by spirit…that the world we live in is alive…and that it is all a great dance of being. Snow on a branch. Frost crystals falling. Light and shadow. Image and reality. Dreams and waking. Knowing and sharing.

It is all about the light shining through.