The Initiation of Light: Revelation, Part 1

I have watched sea spray lunge from wave lips to pluck wings from air like flowers

Feb 28, 2025

Revved Up

I spent a good part of yesterday and this morning working on a long essay I was really excited about. I felt like I was going into unknown territory, thinking as I wrote, an experience I love. I was riding Pegasus, the winged horse, mother of Hippocrene, the spring that birthed the Muses, they who were pushing me toward thoughts I didn’t yet know.

The drive to get my thoughts down felt urgent. I was surging adrenaline, hooked to the high and loving it, until I became aware of a sound interrupting my flow. A shrill skill saw cutting through planks for my landlady’s latest constant construction project. It had been going on for days actually, but so far I’d been able to block it out, keep the flow going and my channel turned to the Muses.

Today, I couldn’t. Just as I received what I knew was a new revelation, a never before thought thought, the saw interrupted and the link between my mind and hands on the keyboard was severed like that two-by-four. I was a short circuit. Time to do something else or implode. (Blowing up was not an option with a month-to-month lease.)

I decided to give up and get the hell out of the house. I picked up a new friend and drove to Kaya’s, my favorite local café where I drank a giant hibiscus kombucha and ate a gluten free vegan scone, fantasized about setting up another friend with a dreamy young man writing in his journal, chatted with the new friend until both of us cringed in actual pain as a motorcycle with straight pipes waiting forever to make a left turn roared four feet away from our table, and found myself back in the driver’s seat yet again trying to escape the onslaught of noise that felt like it was personally chasing me from place to place, until I got it.

Got what? I didn’t know, but I felt an urge to pull over and go in the red antique store with the western facade. I hadn’t been in in a couple of years, but my new friend said she liked to poke around, which made me think of an old friend, who also liked to poke around, and how much fun I used to have doing just that with her, poking around. You never knew what you were going to find. I tend to be more practical with my shopping, so pulling over felt both spontaneous and out of my comfort zone. Maybe poking around would lead to something I couldn’t see yet. Maybe all of a sudden I wouldn’t get so agitated and want to leap out of my skin the next time my landlady fired up the skill saw and the dude on the motorcycle revved right in front of my table at Kaya’s. And if that didn’t happen, maybe I’d find a book, or a groovy Bakelite bracelet, or salt and pepper shakers shaped like lobster claws.

Great Balls of Fire

So there I am picking up sake cups wishing I drank sake because I love little cups. There I am thinking I should just get the cups and offer cups of sake to the mango tree next to my shack. There I am putting the cups down and angling through the packed aisles until I reach the old books and records section in the back, which in Hawai’i (actually everywhere) smells musty and make me feel a little ill. Even though I might get mold poisoning, even though I have a hundred books piled around my shack on every surface, I can’t resist them. There is a treasure here. Something I don’t know I can’t live without, until I find it.

I browse, hunter-gatherer instincts waking up. Nothing on the first few shelves. I round the corner, more hunter than gatherer now, alert for the scent of treasure. Ah, the Hawaiiana section. Always something here I want to read. I pull out a copy of a book by Redmond O’hanlon on living with pygmies in Africa. Tempting. But why is it in the Hawaiiana section? It could be a shelving mistake, but maybe there’s some connection I don’t know about? Maybe not in the actual real world, but in my interior world?

I could investigate, but I decide to put the book back on the shelf, exactly where I found it, because maybe it isn’t mis-shelved. Maybe it’s exactly where it’s supposed to be because the pygmies are trying to get a message to the menehune hiding in between the pages of a book on the Hawaiiana shelf.

Some people think the menehune are mythical beings, some that they actually once existed. Some people think they still exist in our time in another dimension. I don’t know about any of that, but I do know once, years ago, camping by myself at the bottom of Waipi’o Valley, I saw four balls of fire rise out of the ocean, and watched for at least an hour as the balls tossed themselves back and forth on the beach. When I told someone what I saw, a Hawaiian auntie, she looked at me in awe, told me I saw the menehune, who I’d never heard of.

According to her, those balls of fire weren’t throwing themselves back and forth, they were being thrown by the menehune, playing catch like boys with a football.

I believed her because there was no other explanation. If I’d been braver I would have snuck down closer to the edge of the trees and tried to see them. Instead, I lied down in my tent and wished they’d go away. How’s that for being awestruck with wonder? Go away! I remember watching the light arc across the wall of my tent just wishing it would go away. This can’t be happening, I thought. I thought so hard I exhausted myself and fell asleep. In the morning, I almost convinced myself it was a dream, until that auntie told me what I’d seen.

Sacred Transactions

Back in the red antique store with the western facade, I resign myself to not finding a treasure. I start to turn away to make my way out of the labyrinth, but something catches my eye. The book next to the pygmy book. Ao, Ten Years of Light. the spine reads. I slide it out and discover it’s a book of Hawaiian myths and legends accompanied by photographs by the author, Linda Ching. I tuck it under my arm and hand over $15 dollars, toss it in the back seat and forget about it because the actual light is calling me now, so I get in the driver’s seat, drop off my friend, and make my way down to the Pu’uhonua, the Place of Refuge, because when the light calls, the light that breaks from azure to turquoise when waves break on lava, the dancing light, and the still light that magnifies grains of sand in tide pools, I know I am going to be lured down to eye level so I can return the gaze of a tiny eel tucked under a ledge, and to resist that call would be a grave insult.

This eel has been waiting for someone to see him, and he’s been waiting to behold. How long has he been waiting? I don’t know. He’s not very old, but I don’t know how an eel experiences time. Maybe it feels like eons. I lower myself, turn my head horizontal. We make eye contact, are practically face to face, and I notice he’s floating above a shell, an open bivalve, a small, almost translucent oyster.

We all know how oysters form pearls through irritation. Sand gets inside and they make something beautiful out of it that glows. But why does an oyster’s interior shell glow? I lift the bivalve out of the water and look at the sun through the slit between shell-halves. Sea foam just over the lava charges toward me like winged horses. Through this thin layer of mother-of-pearl, my eyes relax enough to receive the light that had been hiding, waiting inside the oyster. We only get to see this interior light when the oyster dies, I think.

Tell It Slant

Back at the shack just after sunset. I sit down again with the essay interrupted by the skill saw, eager to see what the words I’d written earlier had gotten up to while I’d been antiquing and playing in tide pools. I start to read those words that had seemed so exciting and laugh. This is so boring! Who cares about Keats and negative capability? Who cares about how I lived on two islands, both with the initials BI, whose indigenous names both invoked the power of their respective elemental deities, the manitou and the akua? (Well, I do. It is an interesting coincidence, or maybe even fate, but I could see how writing it all down in logical sentences was the exact opposite of negative capability, which I will tell you in case you don’t know, was a term invented by Keats to signify what he considered the highest state of being, at least for poets, characterized by the ability to dwell in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” )

I may care, but if telling you why requires a long parenthetical statement like the one you just read, it’s probably something that doesn’t really matter.

Here’s what I’ve decided, anything that parenthetical probably doesn’t really need to be said. It’s not as interesting as eye-gazing with an eel or being mesmerized by mother-of-pearl. It’s too far into the territory of logic, and since this publication is the antidote for the poison that too much logic has leached into our world, I deleted the whole first essay I wrote and decided to offer you a poem instead. And this long preamble, which I hope the poem doesn’t need, but that you do find entertaining in the way of a poem journey like Zen monk Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North. (Have you read that book? Let me know in the comments. Parentheses allowed.)

I love the concept of negative capability. As a poet, I really get it. I don’t want everything to be spelled out. Poems that tell too much bore me and I rarely finish them. I am not literal. I agree with Emily Dickinson:

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Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

However, I’m aware of how negative capability could be used as a way to encourage people to dumb down, to ignore facts and logic, and to lose their ability to reason.

I’m aware of how dangerous it could be in the hands of some people, say cult leaders, mad scientists, and fascists. who could take over a populace by telling them to ignore facts and trust their imagination over logic, appealing to their dreams for an easier life, even when a river has swept away their town and every hospital bed is filled with people on ventilators.

What I’m saying, is facts aren’t wrong. Facts are things that are measured. They are, however, a product of the tools that measure them. Who makes the tools? That is a question it would be wise to ask.

What a paradox. What would Keats think if he could see us now? I think he’d advise us all to get off our screens and listen to a nightingale. I think he’d be sad that negative capability hadn’t resulted in a more nuanced, tolerant, awestruck civilization, with humans so deeply grateful to be alive they’d imagined their way beyond war.

In fact, not reaching irritably after facts and reason has resulted in a civilization that has become so severed from its imagination that the schism between brain hemispheres has materialized to the point it could lead to a second U.S. Civil War.

Right now, in the U.S. at least, the battle is mostly going on inside, but as the extremes condense, the battle will crack the dam holding back our imagination. The salmon will swim free again upstream, but a lot of people down below will drown.

Does any of this make sense? I deleted two days worth of labor to get to these words and I still don’t know quite what I’m saying. Does that mean I’m wasting my time and yours? I don’t think so. What I’m trying to do, what I’m hoping by showing you my journey, a day in the life of Jen Lighty complete with skill saws, coffee shop motorcycles, antiques, baby eels and oyster shells, is to ignite your own revelation. Let there be light.

Lightning Strikes

When I got home I open up my new book. These are the first words:

“The Kumuliipo, the Hawaiian creation chant, speaks of Ao, the dawning of day emerging from Po, the formless darkness of night.”

And it strikes me: Light is the Revelation.

The Paiwa Heka, the nine principles of the oscillations of magic according to the Mū, the properties of light themselves, are an initiation.

Once upon a time, I imagine, all we had to do was walk in the literal light and it would lead us, through the circumstances of our daily lives. through the stages of initiation we needed to pass through to complete our turn in the human event on Earth.

You know I love metaphors. You know I am not a fan of the literal. But I’m going to say it: It’s time we remembered light is not a metaphor. We made it one because we forgot this. We made it something moral, the opposite of dark. We put a big hex on ourselves and now it’s time to unbind ourselves from that curse.

Light is not a metaphor.

Light is an initiation.

The path to completion is simple. All we have to do is get up and deal with whatever is right in front of us with as much grace and generosity as we can. In the literal light. If you’re a nocturnal sort, don’t worry. Stars will do. They are just more distant suns, after all.

Hands On

I’ll finish this with a poem inspired by a recent craniosacral session I gave. People who’ve never experiences a cranio session often ask me what it is. Most of the time people who have had a session don’t ask. They know.

Craniosacral therapy, which can be explained mechanically as the subtle shift of bones from cranium to sacrum to effect the nervous system, is a way to free the liquid light inside the body, also known as cerebrospinal fluid.

Also known as the god inside.

You have god inside you. We all do. While we are alive, this light lives in the dark of our bodies. It is not an echo of the sun. It’s beyond the sun. It is not a reflection. I think it’s where we go when we die. And if that’s not a place, but a feeling, I’m ok with that. I looked the baby eel in the eye and it looked back. I saw the sun through the oyster’s wings. I never found the pearl, but I found so many treasures.

Light is not a metaphor. Feel the relief of that.

After the craniosacral session, a thought came to me. What if our ancestors, in full union with the properties of light, had no need for initiation as a ceremony that had to be enacted? What if they lived and died in a seamless circle from revelation to completion, following the instructions of each of the properties of light as they presented in their daily lives?

Many of us in the modern world may have lost our indigenous roots and ceremonies, but we still have the light. What if we stopped trying so hard, ceased appropriating cultures that still had intact ceremonies, or remnants at least, and just let light have its way with us? What would happen if we just really received the light?

That doesn’t mean life isn’t going to be hard, but it could get a lot less complicated.

Go outside. Lie on the ground. Rest. Purge yourself of metaphors until you know the ground beneath you really is your mother, and accept they are also the only way you’ll ever come close to describing your revelation with any convincing detail.

And milk all the enjoyment you can out of paradox, it’s the truest way of seeing this life.

And read some poems. The kind that don’t wrap things up and make your whole body shiver. Don’t worry what they mean, but don’t be dumb either. Look up the words you don’t know and maybe use one or two in your next conversation in a noisy café with a new friend, or with a baby eel. And if you find yourself by the edge of the sea alone at night and four balls of fire rise out of the dark water and dance across your retinas, don’t worry. It’s not a dream. You’re not tripping. And you’ll survive.

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The Initiation of Light

Light in my hands—
   liquid bones;

tides pulse  through her body
   land in my palms.

Within, a grave opens.


I am here, a witness
a shore to land on
a horizon
a figure etched in chalk
on the paved ground.

These are not moon tides
pulsing between us,
sourced in reflection,

they have never known 
the sun's touch
gilding our skin as Earth turns—

not away, 
                   not toward—

(Directions only exist in gravity.)


Soon it will be dark.

The light in her body surges
then settles
              a windless sea
          ready for the next ripple.


Where does this light in my hands
cradling her skull, lifting
                                              temples
of jeweled butterflies 
                                out of bones, where

 does it come from?



The open grave  lies    before us.

Have our bones always been this loud?

Why aren't more of us weeping?



                Do butterflies, without bones, experience edges

                                            as openings?


Please don't answer my questions, whoever you are.



I have watched sea spray 
                                       lunge from wave lips
to pluck wings from air like flowers,

picked torn petals out of white surf
I held in my hands till they dried,
hoping they'd fly again,

I have traveled on my own rivers.

Each line on my palms a prophecy
and the testament of my bones.

Calluses earned

proof I have been touched

                                        and been touched

by the light     beyond moon and sun

by the open grave   dug

to be filled.

Note: This is the first part of a series called The Initiation of Light, in which I’ll be exploring the Paiwa Heka, the Nine Principles of the Oscillation of Magic, as revealed to me by Mū Hawaiian lineage holder Ke’oni Hanalei of Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals. I will be exploring the nine principles, that correspond to seven properties of light recognized by science (and going into the implications of that), through fairy tales, myth, poetry, and how they appear in my own life as the series progresses. My intent is to hold space for one property a month, beginning this month with Revelation over the next nine months.

I would love to hear your ideas about revelation and if they shifted after reading this essay. I don’t write to document reality, or even my internal state, I write to move us all, individuals and collectively, beyond what we know. I am hoping this project will create an ongoing dialogue between us that may even ignite your own initiatory processes, or at least a new relationship with the properties of light and awareness of your own inherent magical powers when you align with them. (Haha, at least. Can’t believe I just wrote that. Are you ready? Parenthetically, I’m going to add that your consent is always implicit. I am not going to take you anywhere you don’t consent to go and I am committed to doing no harm, so again, don’t worry. Maybe you’ll even see some menehune or your own local little people. I’ve also got a story about a gnome in a field in Vermont…)

For those wanting to go deeper into that with me (mentorship, not gnomes), I offer private sessions and an online mythic rites of passage mentorship called The Coracle. Please go to my website www.jenniferlighty.com to find out more. I offer free discovery calls which you can book there.

my website

If you would like to engage with me and other readers of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles regarding this exploration of light, I’m hosting a space through Substack Chat for that. Please join my chat by clicking on this link:

Join Jennifer Lighty’s subscriber chat

Available in the Substack app and on web

And finally, I encourage people to go directly to Brother Ke’oni’s website to learn from him directly about Mū Hawaiian culture. He is an awe-inspiring lava fountain of grounded esoteric wisdom and I am so grateful for all he has shared with me.

In April, he’ll be offering a virtual series called The Hala, The 9 Properties of Light, The 9 Octopus Brains, going deep into each of the nine properties I’m exploring in my series The Initiation of Light. I will be a guest speaker on property number two, Reflection. What an honor! We’d love to have you join us.

Aloha mā (self-reflective love/final parenthetical)

The Corpus Callosum Chronicles