Firefly - The Threshold

Dusk. The threshold between day and night. Light, received and carried straight through the dark — not around it, not despite it. Through it.

My favorite color has always been glow-in-the-dark. People like to inform me that isn't a real color. They said the same thing about rainbow. I've mostly stopped arguing. Fireflies didn't get the memo either — they just carry a color nobody believes in and use it to find their way through the dark anyway. Seems to be working out for them.

I used to watch them as a kid, under a night sky I didn't have language for yet. Some Source, whatever it was, made fireflies as an echo of the night sky — close enough to touch, close enough to remember some ancient constellation as home.

They spend up to two years underground as larvae before any of that light shows up at all. Then two to four weeks of actually flying, actually glowing, actually being seen, sharing their light with every species within their habitat.

The one time I ever went backpacking, we camped deep in the Great Smoky Mountains — one of only a handful of places on Earth, alongside a few rainforests in Southeast Asia, where fireflies gather and flash in perfect unison. A genuine highlight inside an otherwise fairly rough trip. And here's the part that actually changed something in me: it isn't only the light they synchronize. Between every pulse, the whole population goes completely dark, together, timed exactly as precisely as the flash itself. The silence is as shared as the glow. Everyone's obsessed with the light show and misses that the dark is doing just as much work.

Light and dark were never actually opposites out there. They're two pulses on one field — thousands of separate bodies moving like a single nervous system, no wire between them, no signal you could ever measure passing hand to hand. Call it whatever you want. I call it the same current running under everything, the quantum hum beneath what only looks like separate things. Nothing is ever really nothing. Even the dark is carrying information. Even the pause is doing work.

That rearranged something permanent in how I see things. I started noticing what I'd never let myself notice. Self-compassion opened up from there — an understanding that my own darkness was never a malfunction. It's a training ground. It's how I learned to hold my own light regardless of what's happening around me.

And that's the whole reason this tier exists. I never once reached into the dark and grabbed a firefly to make it show me its light on my schedule. I waited. I stayed near. I let it be seen only when it was ready to be seen. You get to choose when your own light turns this way — that was never mine to take from you. I'm not reaching for you in here. I'm just staying close, with the light on, in case you ever do.

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Poetry and art living in liminal space, in processing, in the deep feelings carried with it.

Weekly prompts for moving through, for strengthening the relationship with the unknown.

A place where members leave the stories of the ones they've lost — the lessons still teaching, the legacies still carried forward.

A monthly post on nuance in our lives, and thoughts on how to use it to our advantage.

My own art, and the process it took to make it.

Art and poetry that isn't mine, credited, shared because it moved something in me I couldn't keep to myself.

When I complete my HeartLight Center training (8/26), the grief sessions I lead there open their doors here too.

Any free gathering — a circle, a book club — happens in this room first.

Here, we're united in the dark. Watching seasons move past, growing in the space between them. The person I used to be, folded into the person I am now, not discarded. Every transition walked through together, taking turns holding the light when there aren't enough hands left in the mix to hold it alone.

Fireflies only live through the warm months — a quiet reminder that exterior light never lasts, and that the impermanence of it is exactly what sends the search inward, toward the light that does.

Hope. Transience. Community. Inner awakening.