Candle by Daniela Myers-Guzman

Imagine a candle, flame flickering and dancing, imagine a little tea candle, sitting on a cold stone floor, making a halo of warmth and light around it. The rest of the room is dark, dark, dark. The cold stone floor goes on infinitely in all directions for all we know.

Did you know that humans emit light? A faint glow, 200 times dimmer than the eye can see. But we glow.

Imagine a second little tea candle, sitting right next to the first. The warmth has spread, grown. The candles are together, flickering and dancing in sync, warming each other, shedding light on each other. Perhaps the liquid wax chances to spill over so that even such an intimate thing as that is shared.

If 200 people were to stand together, would the faint light we all shed be bright enough to be seen? How intimately close would we all have to be in order to shine?

Many more candles, and perhaps together they’d create a light bright enough to see where the cold stone ends- perhaps even bright enough to warm the cold stone.

There is a thought.

You are the first candle, in the center of the dark, dark room. You can have another candle right next to you. You can have a third, and the three of you can form a perfect triangle. Or better yet, imagine having five other candles, all around you, making a pretty five-petal flower of light, you glowing bright at the center. How lovely, to have so much warmth all around you. All equally close.

            But what if you want a sixth? It wouldn’t fit in the circle around you. It would have to be off to one side, like adding a peak to the flower. At least two other candles are closer to this sixth friend than you are. Can you live with this? Can you bear not being equally close? Oh. Oh, you can expand the circle. The candles all move out a little, just a little, and suddenly there is room for the sixth candle to join. And now you have a bigger circle, surrounding you, all these warm lights with you in the middle. They aren’t touching you anymore. But they are still quite close- close enough to feel their warmth. And you have them all equally close.

            Oh. And now you see. The more candles you have, the greater potential for warmth and light, and yet the bigger the circle grows, the further these warm lights get from you. When you hold them all equally close, the distance grows and grows. And then, eventually, none of them are close. And you are alone again, all alone. A single glowing candle sitting on that dark, cold stone.

           

It takes 200 candles to fill this dark room. With that first tea candle at the very center, and 199 other little tea candles arranged around it- the first five in a circle around you, the next twelve in a circle around them, and so on. All touching, all warming each other, some closer to you, some further, but all together, and all filling up the darkness with a bright, bright light.