This is the season of color and light, and I am always surprised at how much color and light are tied to my spirits and outlook on life. I find the winter challenging and beautiful, but color draws me in and uplifts me in a very particular way.

I find my mind opens wide when I get close to beautiful colors. I feel alone but not in any way sad or hopeless.

Someone accused me the other day of “bringing faith to the faithless and doubt to the faithful” with my writing.

I wasn’t sure if this was a compliment or not, or what was meant by it, but the quote seemed familiar to me and it rang a bell. I looked it up online and found it was originally written by Paul Tillich, a spiritualist and philosopher and one of my favorite writers on faith.

“Sometimes,” he wrote, “I think my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.’Tillich was talking about religion, I believe, and I have no ambitions to shape anyone’s views on religion, at least not consciously. That would seem very presumptuous to me.

But I do like the idea.

I have no  credentials or inclination to shape anybody’s faith. It’s odd, because I was just reading a Tillich essay on his idea of man being very much alone.  I relate very much to that.

“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone,” Tillich wrote. “It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.”

I feel the glory of being alone when I write, as Maria does when she is out in the sunshine gardening or walking in the woods.

I believe Tillich has helped me to see that the point of much of my writing is to deepen my own understanding of the human predicament, and if that is  useful to people, that would bring me great joy.