by Michelle DiSarno
Bring Forth, photograph by Michelle DiSarno
BRING FORTH
As I wake to write this morning, a soft dawn reveals a silver frost on the grass. Today the trees still boast a warm, bright color palette, but soon the leaves will finish falling, and the hues of the earth will dissolve into a barren brown and gray. I am already thinking about Advent–-the work of anticipation, waiting, and welcoming the dark. For the trees, it is a time for growth to slow down, and for roots to store up life. Dormant is not dead. Yet anyone who has been thrust into a dark night of the soul unwillingly has sat in that winter asking, how long? In this mystery, we know that something beautiful is being cultivated: an invisible and necessary work preparing to bring forth fruit. In rootedness, we can rely on the promise that our fruit will remain.
“Though the spring is late and cold,” urges Wendell Berry, “pond, stream, and treetop raise their ancient songs.” May I be like the trees who trust their underground anchor and always lift their arms to the sky.
Home Is the Light, photograph by Michelle DiSarno
HOME IS THE LIGHT
Who among us, in the cold dark wood, can resist returning to fire, to light? By now, my own faith journey has survived many seasons of ambivalence, indignation, and unbelief, yet what has always remained is a tiny flame within. In that flame burns the tenderness of Jesus and His call on my life. No matter how far I drift, it refuses to go out. This photograph—a single candle in the window of home—reminds me of that reality. Even when I can’t see that light, I can bring the image to mind; it is a wordless song inside of me: deep calling to deep, spirit to spirit. It is the faithful, steadfast flame, always beckoning me back home.
MICHELLE DISARNO
Michelle DiSarno is a Special Educator, lifestyle photographer, and poet from New Jersey. She fights back the darkness with delight. She is the author of the forthcoming book So Beautiful It Breaks, a new poetry collection that grieves, wanders, and ultimately celebrates healing through belonging and beauty. Michelle enjoys hiking, framing photographs, and doing life with her community. She often finds herself living at the intersection of life’s greatest tensions: grief and grace, faith and mystery, beauty and longing, ache and awe. She seeks to express these mysteries in her work.
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