The Sun

This poem reflects on the experience of emerging from a difficult season and rediscovering hope.

Using the rising sun as its central image, it explores the relief that comes after darkness while suggesting that external sources of light do more than comfort us—they remind us of the light we already carry within ourselves.

It is a meditation on resilience, self-discovery, and remembering that what sustains us has never been entirely outside of us.

I wrote this poem during a time when I was beginning to catch glimpses of hope after a long period of uncertainty and struggle. That hope didn't arrive all at once. It came in small moments—brief reminders that darkness is not the whole story.

At first, I thought the poem was simply about the comfort of finally seeing the sun after a storm. Looking back, I think it's really about recognition.

One of my favorite lines is:

“The Sun serves merely to reflect
The luminance of your own aspect”

That realization still feels meaningful to me. There are people, places, and moments that seem to bring light into our lives. And they certainly can. But sometimes what they actually reveal is a light that has been quietly present within us all along, waiting for the right conditions to be seen.

The poem doesn't deny the reality of darkness or hardship. In fact, it suggests that those experiences shape our capacity to recognize light when it returns.

This image of the sun was also inspired in part by The Sun (XIX) in the tarot. I've grown to appreciate that card not as a prediction or promise, but as a symbol of clarity, vitality, and joy. To me, it represents the experience of becoming fully ourselves through a journey of chaos and collapse (The Tower XVI), finding healing and refortification (The Star XVII), then continuing through the darkness and uncertainty (The Moon XVIII) in order to reemerge into our own light.

Whether encountered through that archetype or through nature, the idea felt the same to me: the light we seek is often less about something arriving from outside us than about remembering what has been present within us all along.

Perhaps hope is not something we must create.

Perhaps it is something we find already alight inside us: a reminder of our true essence.