Firefly, Fireflies, Fireflies, and Fireflies

Tonight I watched the first episode of Firefly with a friend, and it had this exchange:

Mal: I had a good day.

Simon: You had the Alliance on you, criminals, and savages; half the people on the ship have been shot or wounded, including yourself; and you're harboring known fugitives.

Mal: We're still flying.

Simon: That's not much.

Mal: It's enough.

Struck down, but not destroyed. Still flying. It's enough.

After I drove home, I sat in my car and watched fireflies outside and listened to the first few tracks of the Sara Groves album Fireflies and Songs, and in the title song there is this verse:

We're looking for a firefly

Moving through the night

Staring at that one place

Swear it never lights

Three ways to watch fireflies: 1) staring at one place and finding the firefly has moved on; 2) following one firefly and catching the times it lights; 3) trying to see everything in front of you at once. The firefly moves, and goes dark, but is never alone.

Years ago I wrote a poem called "Fireflies" that goes like this:

Firefly glints in the night—

beauty and longing,

joy and urgency meet

and mingle and this

is and is not

where I most want to be,

most of all places.

I too live a firefly life

here in the night,

striving for greater brilliance,

greater intensity,

sustained in my dark times by

the lights of others,

knowing that after

the final flicker into obscurity comes

the consummation,

for which all beauties

are a preparation.

Someday—the day my dad knows now that he has passed beyond the grip of time into the eternal now of God—the lights won't keep going out. "Someday," as C.S. Lewis wrote, "God willing, we will get in."

Fireflies remind me.

I miss email exchanges like this. But I'm so glad to have had them.

From: Suzanne Winter
Sent: Wed 2/20/2008 5:15 PM
To: Winter, Bill
Subject: Poor sick Dad!


Mom told me you were sick. I'm thinking about you (etc.). Hope you feel better soon!

Love,
Suzanne

________________________________

From: Winter, Bill

Sent: Wed 2/20/2008 6:00 PM
To: Suzanne Winter
Subject: RE: Poor sick Dad!

thanks. i am a little weak and can't even do uppercase.

love,
dad

Old journal entry

Thursday, June 23, 1988

Went to Walden Books, then drove over to Sears. Went to B. Dalton's and Circus World, all just with Daddy. We bought nothing. Daddy says that's good to buy nothing.

[I'm still your little girl, Daddy.]

Woman of Words

My mom can write thank you notes already, to all the people who have done and been so much for us over the past few months. It helps her, putting words on paper and crossing things off her list.

I can't even catch up on my emails. I've tried. I sit down and begin to answer correspondence and I get through a few and run into...blankness. My writing is and always has been not just part of what I do, but part of who I am. And now those words have pulled down, deep down, and the times when they have surfaced they have sometimes felt like shrapnel pulling through me.

I don't know that I want them yet.

So many people have said, "I can't imagine what you must be feeling." In the past, some have told me that when they read what I write they feel themselves there.

I don't know that I want those two things to come together.

There is a lot about my life at this time that I want and don't want to put in writing, want and don't want to share with everyone.

I'm a woman of words and at this time words are often failing me.

(If you wrote to me and expected an answer and didn't get one, this is probably why.)