"Streams of light." I borrowed the phrase from an artist friend who spoke it in the context of how our spirits enter this world – riding on streams of God's love.

It is how the Journal was born on June 7, 2006 – as an effort to send streams of light into the hard, joyous & often heartbreaking world of caregivers – to offer comfort & encouragement to them as they open their hearts every day to people in need.

The Journal has been visited over 200,000 times since that first post. There have been 348,334 page views. Nearly 9000 comments have been posted. This is column number 1,770. These numbers reflect thousands of light-seekers who also want peace.

The very first comment was posted by none other than Liz Wessel who wrote eloquently about the Journal's history this past weekend. In 2010 Liz joined me in writing her own column on the weekends. Her great compositions & stunning mandalas & watercolors have graced the lives of every weekend reader since. She is a true angel. 

The first essay I wrote offered the most peaceful images I could find at the time. It is William Turner's 1843 watercolor masterpiece, "The Lake of Zug – Early Morning." Here is the accompanying prose poem: 

Turner’s Lake

Outside my office window three tree branches dance above bunches of nervous cars driven by blank-faces waiting for red to go green, for tires to turn, for the radio to play the next song.

I close my eyes, open my heart’s door. It’s time to visit the Alpine lake Turner watercolored in 1843’s summer, to watch how the elbow of the blue mountain blocks the sun’s effort to define itself, to notice the fine haze draping the lake below.

In the left distance, two men boat. In the right foreground, children rock-scramble. In the lower left, two inch-high women thigh-deep the lake, wash clothes they aren’t wearing, sun their skin.

Maybe today, in a nearby hospice, a caregiver will take her patient’s hand, listen to his pictures, pour out a blue lake, arrange some rocks around it & spread out the sun for him as he lies dying beside her. 

Turner's mountain peaks will pierce the sky, his painted children will play on the paper they have occupied for 173 years

& the two men will sway in a wooden boat that will never reach the shore.

May you experience streams of light as these words & this image pass before you.

-Erie Chapman