I’m in Lake Tahoe as I write this, and a few nights ago, during the full moon, I stepped out onto the deck and took this photograph. 
The lake was moving—not wildly, not storming—but not still either. There was a quiet rhythm across the surface, and the moonlight stretched out over the water in a way that immediately drew me in.
What stayed with me wasn’t just the beauty of it, but the feeling of it.
It brought back a line from a poem I wrote some time ago:
“When I come to the end of the tunnel, and there is no light left,
you will teach me to see in the dark.”
I’ve been sitting with that line, because there are moments—more than I would like to admit—when things don’t feel clear, when something shifts quickly, and what I thought I understood no longer holds. I find myself trying to orient in the middle of something I didn’t expect.
Caregiving can feel like that. Life can too.
We look for clarity, for some kind of light, for a sense of what to do next—and sometimes, that just isn’t available.
Standing there, looking out at the lake, I realized I wasn’t finding answers. I was simply noticing—the movement of the water, the reflection of the moon, the way light was still present, even in the dark.
And something in me recognized, quietly and without explanation, that perhaps seeing in the dark isn’t about figuring things out at all. Perhaps it has more to do with staying present—even when we don’t feel steady, even when we don’t have clarity, even when the “light” we’re looking for isn’t showing up in the way we want.
I notice how quickly I move to make meaning of things, to understand, to resolve, and yet there are moments like this that ask something different of me—not to figure it out or name it, but simply to be with what is here.
Nature seems to offer this quietly, again and again—light and dark, movement and depth, uncertainty and presence existing side by side.
And perhaps there is something in us that already knows how to be with both—not perfectly, not all the time—but enough to stay with ourselves, even in the dark.