epiphany 2026

When the smallness of my vision

Dampens all hope inside, I simply watch

And these clumsy feet keep moving.

When what could have been

Turns bitter and dusty from wear

I feel the tiniest move as a miracle.

When the bit is cold in my mouth and

When daylight reveals only a potholed

Road, just the sound of my feet can comfort.

Rising up from this pain is not grand or special

If it says anything it says star dust knows

It says come with me just one more time.

Miracles always have their own strange rhythm

To know them is to place power into the possible

And God as surprised as anyone when they happen.

‘Miracles’

Dale Byron

The Wise-Ones I have been journeying with during Advent have reached the point where, following their meeting with the ChristChild, it is time to go home.  However, changed by their encounter, they make yet one more astute political and spiritual decision: to obey the dreams which tell them not to report back to Herod in Jerusalem about their discoveries, but to go home via an alternate route.  Once more they are reliant on the Cosmos to guide them.  They cannot even use the knowledge they garnered from their outbound adventure.  The way is full of darkness, unknowing and unknowns – yet again.

I had grand plans for how I was going to celebrate Epiphany 2026.  I had hoped to launch a new Substack called ‘Epiphany of the Ordinary’, a place where I can share my poetry and perhaps my contemplative photography and other visual arts.  I wanted to write an essay explaining exactly what I mean by ‘epiphany of the ordinary’, (a phrase some readers will already be familiar with from this blog and from the hashtag I use for my Facebook iPhone project, ‘acts of daily seeing’).  The essay would be lavish in its footnotes, full of resources I have gathered over the last few years, exactly for this purpose.  Then I wanted to publish a cycle of poems I made during the Winter of 2022-3 entitled ‘making my own constellation.’  I thought that the Wise-Ones’ return journey would provide a neat segue!

As it is, I feel (once more) cast back into the regions of the unknown.  The last couple of weeks, which I had reserved for writing and setting up the launch, have evaporated into the fug of another virus and a lost voice, and I have barely left bed, most days unable even to sit up and write, even if I could think straight.  So, I either postpone the grand launch, so perfectly planned and timed for this exact day; or, I let go my control, and simply launch without a fanfare, without the ‘correct marketing plan, without it all being ‘professional’.  I remind myself that there will be time to build the site around the material at a later date – once I have learnt the platform’s technological quirks and possibilities.

Learning such lessons about adaptability does not come easily to my recovering-perfectionist self.  And yet, creating from the ‘messy middle’ is what I do all the time, repeatedly making compromises or taking ‘alternate routes’ due to lack of energy, or trembling limbs, or brain fog.  Releasing the idea of a grand planned hope is a different way of coming home to myself, true, but one which I feel Spirit nudging me firmly toward, telling me ‘let it be, let it stand’; unideal, but real.  Allow this new venture to begin as a leap of faith into the realms of the possible  – this time, without even the pretence of perfected preparations. 

Or at least, let it be one small step in the right direction of Trust, since ‘star-dust knows’, as Dale Biron observed (above).

Let it be 

that on this day 

we will expect 

no more of ourselves 

than to keep 

breathing

with the bewildered 

cadence

of lungs that will not 

give up the ghost.

Let it be 

we will expect 

little but 

the beating of 

our heart, 

stubborn in 

its repeating rhythm 

that will not 

cease to sound.

Let it be 

we will 

still ourselves 

enough to hear 

what may yet 

come to echo:

as if in the breath, 

another breathing; 

as if in the heartbeat, 

another heart.

Let it be 

we will not 

try to fathom 

what comes 

to meet us 

in the stillness 

but simply open 

to the approach 

of a mystery 

we hardly dared 

to dream.

‘In the Breath, Another Breathing’ 

 Jan Richardson, Circle of Life, (146-7)

the negative end of the telescope (Canon R10. f8. 1/1600. ISO 100.)