I have this friend who loves to light things up. She takes ordinary objects and injects them with spices of color and joy.
It’s hard to look at glowing wall decorations without smiling. Light up clothes, or bottles, even her fish are the glow-in-the-dark kind. She has light boxes strung with beads and LED strands over the mirrors. There are so many creative projects in her apartment and it’s perfectly easy to see that:
Colored, shining lights make people happy.
She even inspired me to try my own light up projects. She made herself, me and our third friend each a glowing umbrella. We took them to Wickerman and enjoyed frolicking across the mountain, especially thankful when the festival took a rainy turn. I gave mine away at the very end, determined to make another better than the first.
And so I did, and now I have a really amazing rainbow umbrella with color changing LED lights. It’s all the color and brightness that I could dream of, better suited for me than the one she made. And I put it together because my friend shared a little bit of her light with me.
She can’t stop trying new ways to use light. It’s a way of living more people should embrace, metaphorically speaking. We can’t all want to make our coffee tables glow – that’s not what I mean. What we all do share is a common soul, a piece of love and light and goodness within that can spread like wildfire from one human being to the next. And we can always find new ways to use this love and light.
Similar to how I made my own light up umbrella, a little bit of goodness inspires goodness to blossom. It’s incredible how fast light can spread. All it takes is a gesture, good deed or helping hand to start the process. I’d never even thought about lighting up umbrellas before my friend had the idea. But once I saw it done I wanted to do it myself, using my own energy. The idea transformed with me and became something I could repeat, change and enhance.
The great thing about ideas is that they never stop transforming. Learning comes best when we work together, and the same way my friend shared her light with me, so I need to share my light with the world.
In some ways I still feel so young. I mean I am young, I’m not very old at all, relatively speaking. I just turned a quarter of a century; I’m fresh, a new adult in the world taking on a new stage of life. Yet in some ways I feel so old already. My childhood is long behind me, and even my college days are feeling blurred. I’ve gone through an amazingly high amount of crazy experiences, life altering choices and personal growth. I couldn’t possibly retain every single memory and moment of my life, so it’s important to hold onto the warm ones, the fuzzy good ones, the kind that make me happy. Then, there’ll be nothing left but the goodness to pass onward.
And it so happens that glowing lights make me happy. There’s nothing that sounds better than sharing these lights, my light, with the world. Maybe we can eventually have the whole world glowing. That’s a sight I’d like to see.
Lady Jenji Writing & Design 