The Light We Cannot Pack Away

Tonight, I sit in the darkness of my lounge room, mesmerised by the lights of the Christmas tree.

The colours flicker gently across the room, filling it with warmth and peace. I love this time of night, when the noise of the day has faded and everything becomes still. There is nothing to do for a moment but sit, breathe and simply be. The house has settled into its own quiet rhythm — a floorboard easing, the faint tick of the tree lights as they warm, the hush that only comes once a home has stopped asking anything of you.

Tomorrow is Epiphany. As tradition asks, I will take down the Christmas tree and carefully pack away the decorations that have adorned our home throughout the season. Each ornament will be wrapped and returned to its box, the tree stripped back to its bare shape, the room made ordinary again.

But tonight, the lights remain.

A moonbeam glistening across the pool catches my attention, and I feel drawn outside. Standing beneath the night sky, I lift my eyes towards the stars and remember the ancient story of the Magi — wise travellers who followed a star to Bethlehem, where they found the infant Jesus.

They began their journey without knowing exactly where the light would lead them. They did not have the certainty of a map, only the faith to keep walking beneath something they could not fully explain. I think of them often at this time of year, not as figures in a nativity scene but as companions in the ordinary, unglamorous work of following something you cannot yet name.

For centuries, people have looked to the stars for direction. They have guided travellers across oceans and deserts, through darkness and uncertainty, long before compasses or maps existed to reassure them they were on the right course. Sailors trusted them. Nomads trusted them. Entire civilisations built their calendars, their harvests, their sense of time itself, around the quiet, faithful appearance of light in the dark.

Perhaps they still guide us, although not always in ways we immediately understand. Perhaps the guidance was never meant to be obvious — only trustworthy, in hindsight, once we have walked far enough to look back and see the shape of the path we followed.

Outside in the night air, I am reminded that stillness creates room for contemplation. It allows us to notice the quiet signs we might otherwise overlook — the moments of light that appear along our path, sometimes long before we understand their meaning. I have learned, slowly and often reluctantly, that meaning rarely arrives on schedule. It arrives when it arrives, and our task is simply to keep the light, however small, until it does.

There are many traditions we have forgotten or never learned to value. Now that I understand the significance of Epiphany, I will always cherish it. For me, it marks an awakening: the moment something within me stirred from a long spiritual sleep and the path ahead began to be illuminated.

On Epiphany in 1992, a radiant light filled my bedroom. Within it, I sensed the presence of an angel and received a series of visions that I came to call my life maps. They arrived not as words but as images — clear, strange, and utterly certain, the way a dream sometimes feels more real than waking life. I did not have language for what had happened to me, only the quiet, unshakeable knowledge that I had been shown something true.

I could not understand them all then. Perhaps I was never meant to. Some of those images sat with me for years, folded away like the ornaments I would soon pack into their boxes — present, but out of sight, waiting for their season to come round again.

In January 1995 came another gift — the anticipation of Caleb’s arrival. One vision, at least, had found its meaning quickly. Others would take decades.

Then, in January 2020, while I was in Scotland, I began to understand the final life-map vision: a sack of money beneath a tree. Twenty-eight years after that first radiant night, one more piece of the map resolved into something I could finally read.

I had always known there was something significant about the sixth of January. What I had not known was that this date already carried an ancient story of revelation — of something previously hidden becoming visible. My own small awakening had been quietly keeping company, all along, with a much older one.

To honour the day, we decided to travel to the far north of Scotland, hoping to witness the Aurora Borealis. Only as I began writing that night did I realise that Sleeping Beauty’s name was Aurora. When I searched for its meaning, I discovered that Aurora means dawn.

The word settled within me like a quiet reassurance. Dawn — the first light after darkness. A beginning. An awakening. It felt like the perfect name for the day I would travel north in search of light and rainbows.

Like Sleeping Beauty, I too had awakened — but not from an enchanted sleep. I had awakened to a more mysterious way of living: one in which dates can hold memories, symbols can wait years to be understood, and the path ahead is sometimes revealed only when we are ready to recognise it.

Tomorrow, I will take down the tree and return its lights and decorations to their boxes. The room will look, for a while, as though nothing had ever hung there at all. But I have come to understand that some things resist their boxes. Long after the branches are bare and the last strand of lights is coiled away in the dark of a cupboard, something of their glow remains — carried forward not in the room, but in me.

For I know now what I did not know in 1992, standing in the glow of a bedroom filled with light I could not name: that the seasons of packing away are never really endings. They are only the tree returning to its box, waiting, as I once did, for its next Epiphany.

Yet I know that light itself cannot be packed away.