It’s good if you can find one good person you can trust. That is how you build a secure attachment, and it is how you become aware there is good in the world. But I have also been around a lot of people who have not had good attachments – people who have experienced mostly pain in their caregiver relationships, but are able to reach deep down inside themselves and find love and care for themselves and others despite. It is amazing. The world will try to diminish and extinguish the fire that burns inside a human soul, but it never quite gets snuffed out.

The goal of secure attachment is autonomy. Once you have located the light and know it exists, you learn to look for it not only in that original place you found it, but in lots of different places. In fact, you carry it around inside yourself and can access it whenever you need it. You imagine your mother’s or another’s gentle receptivity. You remember someone else’s way of holding themselves solidly and pretty soon realize you can do it, too. After a while, you embody the same sureness without even thinking about it. There are all these little light bearers around if you look, and the light is in you, too.

One great gift is to understand that good is not just in one person or even one group of people. There are little light particles which have spread themselves out all over the place. It is a spirit, so it is abstract, transferable and transportable.

But we have this need to know, define and thereby control what is good. Once you have christened one set of people or things good, you have, by implication, deemed other things “not good.” Sure, we want to know the light is “right here” in this person or this thing, or that the truth exists in this set of beliefs or with this group of people. That means it is not “over there” in that other person, group of people or place. We like to feel like we can locate the truth or the light and understand it. That way we can own it. We then become (in our own minds) the purveyors of it to others. As soon as you start taking on that mentality, there are going to be places you don’t look for the light because you assume it will not be there. After all, you and people like you are the ones who own it and not “those other people.” You stop looking for it in the places where you don’t expect you’ll find it, which means you will probably not see it if it does show itself in those most peculiar of places.

I defy you to find a person that does not have yet a flicker of a spark within them. If they are living and walking around, they have not yet given up on trying to fan the flame inside themselves into one that lights the way and provides a certain warmth to others. And everything that is happening around you is the light just trying to be let loose and emerge from the darkest of places. Yes, every little thing that happens, no matter how dark, will eventually show itself to be the working out of some redemption, or show the light even more starkly by its abject darkness.