“Fingers of light reaching down to stir the waters, like a scene from one of the stories her father used to tell, when she was a little girl and still believed in miracles.”

The Light Keeper, Chapter One

I know, it’s hard right now. Maybe you’re an extrovert craving company, or an introvert wishing you didn’t have to share your living space quite so much. Maybe it’s touch you long for. A hug, a kiss. Maybe your life feels like it’s in suspension. Maybe you’ve lost someone. Maybe you feel lost. I’m sorry. It is tough. I’ve been walking a lot to try and clear my head, going up to the top of the hill near my home where I can see right along the coast and watch the weather shifting slowly, on a grand scale. The sky is wide until the clouds arrive, sweeping down and smothering the world until it’s dark and damp and shrunken and all the colours die. There’s nothing to see now but grey. You wish you were in a pub somewhere, warm by a fire, then you remember there are no pubs. You wonder how you’re ever going to get home. But the one thing that being up there so often does show is that however dark the moment, however challenging the circumstances, if you can just hold on – zip up tight, pull up your hood, keep going – then everything will change again.

This is not a profound or an unusual thought. I’m no guru. I just wrote a story set on a hill on the edge of things and I walk that landscape often thinking about love, hope, faith, grief, longing and life, believing that the divine is real and in our lives if we can only see it, hear it, feel it. Sarah knows it, in the story. She dares to hope. She knows that if she can just hold on for long enough, the moment will come when everything changes.

And I hope that’s true for you too, in these trying times. Be safe. Stay well. Dare to hope. Care for those who need you, reach out for help yourself. We all need that sometimes. Wherever you are, whether this is real or metaphorical, keep looking out to where the sea should be. Keep searching for those fingers of light, because one day soon the storm will pass.