Sometimes a single word can crack you open.

My wonderful friend Marcia responded to my post the other day about flames and kerosene and inner spark with this: “Your writing really moves me, Iris. It churns my own creativity. And, while this may seem a little weird 🙃, I was playing with the word ‘glimmer’ in my head, and I came up with a little poem.

Iris

The limner holds a steady pen,
Beckoning light and healing in.
She brushes off the dimmer page
With words that speak her inner sage.
They spark and shimmer and fan a fire,
That lifts the soul a little higher.
Golden the glimmers that dance and sway,
promising peace in each new day.
The limner holds a steady pen,
Beckoning light and healing in.

Manna. That is the only word for it. (Thank you, Merriam-Webster Dictionary: divinely supplied spiritual nourishment.)

I wrote about fire, and she wrote me a poem. One spark lighting another, exactly the way it’s supposed to work.

But tucked inside her poem was a word I wasn’t familiar with: limner. I could have scrolled past, but I didn’t. Instead, I looked it up this morning, and down the rabbit hole I went.

A limner. A painter of portraits. An illuminator of manuscripts. Those extraordinary medieval artists who bent over vellum by candlelight, pressing gold leaf and lapis lazuli into letters so that the Word itself would glow. So that a reader, centuries later, could reach through the page and feel the heat of that original flame.

And the godwink glimmering in this share from a friend?

I happen to collect illuminated manuscripts. I’m pretty sure that Marcia does not know that. I have them hanging in our home and in my office, and every time I pass them I feel the same pull: music, spirituality, beauty, and history, all compressed into a single illuminated letter. The thing I love most about them is that you don’t just see them. You can almost hear them. A manuscript page is a chord.

I wonder sometimes if I would have been able to receive any of this before. The manuscripts on the wall, yes, I have a long history there. But Marcia’s poem landing on me the way it did this morning, that quality of being cracked open by a single word left for me by a friend? I think that took some clearing of the dimmer page first.

And reading her poem, for the countless -nth time, this morning, I thought of how it all began.

My business partner is twenty years my senior, and in the very beginning, he had a way of seeing things in me before I could see them myself. Early in our company’s life, barely knowing what we were building yet, we found ourselves at a choir conference together. He stopped in front of a large illuminated manuscript, the kind that stops you in your tracks, and the first tangible one I had seen that I could actually hold. At its center, beautifully highlighted with color and life: the letter I.

We bought it. With the first real funds our fledgling company had ever received. No safety net, no roadmap, no idea what we were actually building. Most partners at that stage are debating business plans. We were apparently writing an arts plan.

One illuminated letter per year was our plan. One for each letter of our acronym, D… C… I… N… Y, getting a head start with the letter “I”. Five letters. Five years. A promise made half in faith and half in joy, the way the best promises usually are.

We made it. All five letters, one per year, just as we’d said. And we didn’t stop there. We are at nineteen now, and counting. Years, that is, not manuscripts.

But that first one, the “I”, was something more than a collecting impulse. My business partner saw it and we bought it for the company, yes, and for Iris.

I still blush when I think about that moment. To be seen not just as a colleague or a co-founder but as someone whose inner life was worth illuminating. Who might herself be a muse for others. You know the feeling. That moment when someone holds up a mirror and shows you something in yourself you weren’t sure was really there. That you weren’t sure you deserved to be there. I wasn’t sure I believed it then. I’m still learning to believe it now.

And then here comes Marcia this weekend, a spark catching light from a spark I didn’t even know I’d struck. Her word limner spinning me back to that choir conference, to gold leaf pressed into vellum by someone who wanted the light to last. Her poem landing on me like manna.

The limner holds a steady pen, Beckoning light and healing in.

Maybe that’s all any of us are trying to do. Hold the pen steady. Let the light through. Trust that somewhere down the line, someone will look up the word we left them and fall down their own beautiful rabbit hole.

So I’ll leave you with this: what spark are you sitting on that you haven’t thrown kerosene on yet? What flame in you is waiting for someone to simply notice it and call it by name? Say it out loud. Write it down. Tell the friend who would notice. There is more kindling out there than you think.

Thank you, Marcia. You lit something up. I love you too.