There were times when I questioned if I should continue with seminary, and then there were times when I wondered if the course work would ever come to a completion. It was a long journey, one which required that I draw upon all my spiritual practices to persevere. The Experiment with Light is one of those practices.
Trust is a thread that ran through many of my Experiments during that time. Trust. It is such a simple concept, yet one that is not always easy to know when and how to apply. Trust. There was no other guidance, suggestion, or direction given. Trust. It wasn’t just the studies that were causing a strain. Trust. I’d traveled over eighteen hundred miles and missed my friends and familiar surroundings. Trust. At times I wondered if my marriage would survive. Trust. And what difference would seminary make, anyway? Trust.
There were many forms of support around me—my wife Jaimie; Gil, my spiritual companion; there were new 12 Step connections; fellow seminarians, professors, and staff; and of course, God and all those on the other side of the veil. Still, there was often an underlying sense of doom and impending catastrophe which, I realized, was of my own making through replaying messages from conscious and unconscious stories I’d been telling myself most of my life. The Experiment with Light meditation helped me to move through these impediments and arrive at a more wholesome state of being.
The Experiment with Light is a simple guided meditation that is most often practiced with a small group, though the meditation is effective when practiced alone. What is this Experiment with Light? Let’s explore this over the next little while. Daniel+
Light's Ways With Daniel 
Yeah, it is really hard to find guidance when you don’t have anyone to talk to. I knew this summer that I needed more guidance with the kind of life I have to live, and other priorities that I have led me there. We had hoped to stop by my friend’s grave on our trip but could not go into the reservation because of COVID. As we passed near Shiprock on our way north, I said to myself that I would like to find a book by a Native American author about ecology because I felt I needed another perspective for my own environmentalism. My last chance to find something occurred when we stopped at a “trading post” when we returned to AZ off of the freeway. I found a book in which the author talks about having a relationship with nature and that nature is trying to have a relationship with us. He says that it is trying to communicate if we will only know what some symbols mean and will pay attention. He also talked about creating a prayer wheel, which I did, from a tree branch at one of out campsites. The author says that it doesn’t matter if what you are acting in accordance with is real or not, what matters is that you act as though it is. This allows your unconcious to release information to which you otherwise would not have access. It is hard, but sometimes, in the right conditions, I do get something. Sometimes I wonder if the direction and the support I want has to come more from being alone, or learning to do things differently with relation to myself. I am open to others (or so I think), but I am often led back to me.
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