A little girl tugged gently at her mother’s dress.
“Mom, what is this?”
Her mother glanced down.
“That’s a lantern.”
“Really? What does it do?”
“It shines.”
“Shines at what?”
The mother, distracted by the demands of the day, almost answered in the language so many adults learn to speak.
“It just shines.”
Not because she didn’t love her daughter, but because she had forgotten, for a moment, how children ask.
Busy.
Human.
Yet absent.
She noticed the confusion gathering across her daughter’s face. One question had not disappeared—it had become ten. So she stopped.
She knelt until they were eye to eye.
The world seemed to pause.
She left the language of efficiency and entered the language of presence.
“My sweet daughter,” she said softly, “the light shines so that we may see each other… clearly.”
“It fills the room. It travels through wires and electricity. It reaches places we cannot. But it is not separate from you.”
She smiled.
“It shines for you, so that you may see the beauty around you, and discover the light already within you.”
“It is not merely beside you.”
“It shines as you.”
The little girl looked back at the lantern, but she no longer searched for an explanation.
She had received something greater than an answer.
She had been seen.
That moment settled quietly into her heart.
As she grew, the world taught her to search for light elsewhere—in achievements, in people, in love, in conflict, in approval, even in war. She looked for it in everything she believed might finally make her feel illuminated.
Yet the light her mother gave her that day never faded.
Because it had never belonged to the lantern.
It belonged to presence.
It belonged to love that stopped long enough to speak a child’s language.
It belonged to the quiet knowing that she was never separate from the light she sought.
And so, while the world hurried past in endless motion, she carried that stillness within her.
A light that did not merely shine upon her.
A light that shone through her.
Vachon Imagined 
Leave a comment