For most of the month of August, my day has begun before sunrise. I haven’t made this choice because of scheduling requirements or even a desire to walk so early. I have made this choice because the only way to spend substantial time moving outside these weeks has been to do it as early or as late as possible. And I am not an evening person, not in the slightest.

The world is different, in those moments before the sun is visible over the horizon (or, in my case, over the buildings that block the horizon view). Even though I know that the day ahead will test my ability to embrace the heat and humidity that is a Washington August, now, I can feel a breeze. I can hear the birds stirring and gathering their breakfast before they fly into their refuge in the trees for the rest of the day.

And then there is the moon. It took me a little while to learn that the moon would not always be in the same location in the sky each morning (sorry, I am pretty much a city girl). And it has taken many a morning’s walk to escape the heat to relax enough into the morning darkness to savor what I see.

I realized this morning that, the gift of these hot and steamy days has been another chance to learn again what it means to walk in the dark. And that, of course, caused me to open again one of my favorite books by Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark (2014).

Maybe I am so attached to this book because it was the one that she was finishing up when she was the graduation speaker for my class that year. Or maybe I return to it over and over again because Taylor speaks with the voice I wish that I could master, with that storyteller’s ability to call our attention to the details around us that we need most at the moment that we can finally use them.

So here I am, once again, learning to walk in the dark. There is so much right now that we label as darkness, in our human, dualistic-thinking way. But as Taylor reminds us, there is no darkness without light (and vice-versa). And, without doubt, damage is done over and over again with the equation of good and evil to the ideas of light and dark.

And so I will continue to read and I will continue to embrace my moonlit morning walks as Sister Moon offers me a different kind of light to guide me in my current phase of life. And who better to teach a spirituality of phases than this particular sister?