One Luminous Thread

On survival, small acts of care, and carrying the light forward

All images created by author using Substack’s image generator

There have been seasons in my life when the days have felt unbearably heavy, when the air itself seems dimmed, the kind of times that make me wonder how to keep going with my chin held high and my heart open, how to keep tending the small fire of my often quite insular life. I am certain you have been through your own seasons, and perhaps even are experiencing something like that right now. Today I want to say that even in those times, goodness—or dare I say hope—has its own stubborn way of breaking through like a moment of warmth on the face. Sometimes it’s in my grandchild’s laughter, sometimes it’s in an encouraging message from a friend, sometimes its when I sit with a fallen leaf and attentively render it in my sketchbook, sometimes it’s in a single golden moment in the fields where we walk and where the world around me seems to gleam as if untouched by shadow. Of course, sometimes days can also be pretty abysmal, where I can’t seem to do anything right, where the news is about as grim as I can imagine, where my body feels like it just wants to curl around a pillow, forget about the world and sleep for days.

I remember watching The Last Kingdom a couple of years ago, a BBC/Netflix series set in the time of King Alfred the Great, before England was even England. What struck me most wasn’t the epic Viking versus Saxon battles or the bloodshed, or even the arresting characters and complex relationships, but the simple fact that any of us are still here at all. My ancestors were in those places at that time. When I think of those who came before me, I am stunned by the sheer miracle of their survival. Centuries of war, famine, plague, back-breaking work that never ended, unspeakable injustices and cruelty, and still, as sure I sit here typing this on a MacBook Air computer in 2025, somehow, some very crazy somehow, my bloodline endured.

And you know, somehow art endured, too, the poems and lore written in exile (think of Beowulf), embroideries made in scarcity (think of St. Cuthbert's vestments), ornate jewellery forged from bronze and precious gems (look up the Alfred Jewel), chants that carried across battlefields. I can’t help but think that if the people alive at that time could endure those days and still create such treasures, then surely I can easily endure the ones I’ve been given and make it to my art table or writing desk more often than I have been.

When I think of all of that, my complaints and worries fall quiet. If my ancestors could keep fighting for what they believed in times far more difficult than these, then I can keep fighting, too. Perhaps our task now is not to despair, but to plant what we can in this ground right around us. I am thinking of small acts of care, small works of beauty, small kindnesses that ripple outward, the most ordinary of compassionate gestures that can go forth and multiply.

It leaves me with the question of what it means to live in gratitude for that inheritance. Perhaps it is this: to keep planting what I can, however small. To tend my little patch of ground, even in uncertain weather. To make the marks, write the words, notice the beauty, answer the difficult calls, sit with the discomfort, but also just———keep on swimming. It may mean five brief minutes on days when I’d rather be asleep. It may mean saying no to something that truly does not matter, and instead spending the time creating something that can brighten another person’s day. To trust that the seeds I plant now will be part of someone else’s survival one day, just as the work of those before me has carried me.

Right now I am thinking of all that extra time I had during the Covid lockdown, and how I made tiny needle-felted creatures and sent them anonymously to people in my village and beyond that I knew were sheltering in place alone. That is the kind of thing I am imagining. Small acts of care. I may not have that amount of time anymore, but there are things I can do that take very little time at all.

Remember when Mr. Roger’s said to look for the helpers? It is not enough to look for the helpers. We must be the helpers. We must be the helpers with our words, with our hands, with our art, with our steady tending of what is good and worth keeping, of what is worth the fight. This is how light continues, even in shadow: one seed, one gesture, one luminous thread at a time.