Monday 5 May 2014

This Brightness That You Bear


A Blessing for My Family

This blessing hardly knows what to say,
speechless as it is not simply
from grief but from the gratitude
that has come with it

the thankfulness that sits
among the sorrow
and can barely begin to tell you
what it means not to be alone.

This blessing knows the distances
you crossed in person in prayer
to enter into days of waiting,
nights of long vigil.

It knows the paths you traveled
to be here in the dark.
Even in the shadows this blessing
sees more than it can say and has simply

come to show you the light
that you have given 
not to return it to you
not to reflect it back to you

but only to ask you to open your eyes
and see the grace of it,
the gift that shines
in this brightness that you bear.
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Monday 1 July 2013

Brightness



The term brightness is also used in discussions of sound timbres, in a rough analogy with visual brightness. Timbre researchers consider brightness to be one of the perceptually strongest distinctions between sounds, and formalize it acoustically as an indication of the amount of high-frequency content in a sound, using a measure such as the spectral centroid.