Love In The Light and Shadow

Life recently has been a journey, probably the hardest I've taken so far. From three years ago, when I lost my dad, to a couple of months ago, when my mom passed away, it felt like a journey marked by endings and goodbyes, marked by loss—the kind of loss that leaves loneliness in the place where love once lived. For a while, I thought maybe love had left altogether, but it never left. It just changed.

A few weeks ago, I took my first trip since everything happened. I'd been in a kind of hibernation mode before that, and it felt good to get some physical distance from it all. I returned to Korea, Japan, and Malaysia, which have always been inspiring places for me. I joked to some of my friends on the way that “the cafes will heal me”. In the end, they probably did play a part.

I've come to realise I had a narrow view of love. I knew parental love; I knew romantic love. And when you lose both of those things, you can be tempted to think, "Maybe I'm just destined to be alone." But I just had to learn to find it in other places. Even though I had to wrestle with big questions and grapple with disappointment, I found love in God. I learned that God is love, and like God, love is everywhere.

Love is in friendships—the people who hold you and support you and make you laugh on the days your heart feels heavy. The ones who reach out and check in, the ones you can share everything with, and they stick around. Love is in the sunrise, in the changing of seasons, in the colors of the sky and the swaying of the trees. It's in a good cup of coffee and the smile of a stranger.

It's in the spaces designed and created by someone just so your senses can experience something beautiful for a moment. It's in dogs and in birdsong. I found love in music, in seeing people follow their passions and explore their creativity.

I found it in following my own passions and my creativity, in friends taking on my work with the same passion they would if it was their own, in songs that were born out of personal grief but finished in community. I found it in writing, in giving an outlet to the feelings swirling around inside me, in poetry, in becoming fluent in the language of the heart, in not holding back everything that was within me and waiting to flow out.

I found it in light and shadow—komorebi, as they call it in Japanese, the word for the specific dappled shadows of the sun coming through trees. The truth is, life is light and shadow, like the rhythm of night and day circling our planet. Our precious earth - experiencing night and day simultaneously. Joy and suffering coexist. Pleasure and despair share the same space. Mourning and dancing, crying and laughing. And even though all the love I lost was real and worth grieving, the joy I found in the middle of the process is just as real. I'm still learning to see it and to feel it, and that's okay. Healing, like a journey, doesn't always move in straight lines. Sometimes it twists and turns; sometimes you feel further back than when you started. But sometimes, like the sun through the leaves, the light gets in.