Radiant

May 7, 2026

I used to think radiant meant a kind of easy light— the glow of a good night’s sleep, a face turned toward the sun, something you could bottle, brand, or casually say at a dinner party: “You look radiant.”

Then I read Rumi whisper,
“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”

Radiant, there, meant cosmic—
not polished, but burning.

And William Wordsworth
gave us “a glory and a dream,”
light remembered, not possessed—
radiance as something that slips
through time and still warms the hands.

Today, I start radiation…again.

A word splits open.
Radiant: from radius, a ray—
a line moving outward,
a force that doesn’t ask permission
to touch what it touches.

There’s nothing Instagram about this glow.
No filter for the hum of machines,
the geometry of beams,
the quiet choreography of targeting
what has grown too fast inside me.

And yet—
there is a strange companionship
between the poets and the physicists.

Both know
that light is never just light.
It alters what it meets.
It leaves a trace.

So here I am,
lying still while something invisible
does its work—
not unlike grief,
not unlike love.

If I am radiant now,
it is not because I shine without fracture,
but because I am willing
to be entered by the ray,
to let what needs to be burned away
be burned,
to trust that what remains
is not dimmer,
but truer.

Not untouched—
but illuminated.

Of course, I must end with Sir Rumi
who wrote that
“the wound is the place
where the Light enters you.”

I appreciate all the love coming my way, including this beautiful sentence from Rebecca: “You are a light in this world of wonder and I see your light and it will only become brighter and brighter until there is no individual you but only THE LIGHT.”