The Definition of Ray

Saint Raymond was the patron saint of secrets and silence,
of unborn children
and women in labor

No surprise, as our Ray could keep confidences and share silence with unusual grace.
A grace he extended to laboring women, and every child––unborn, newborn, inner,
sensing the subtleties of our passages and beyond

Ray also means a beam of light, or
each of the lines in which light (and heat) may seem to stream
    from the sun or any luminous body.
The warmth, the light, we basked in those.

In math, a ray is any set of straight lines passing through a central point,
(the central point being us, right here, in the convergence or emergence of our lives and destinations)
The ray is the part of a line that starts here and goes to infinity.

It means to spread, radiate, 
symmetry around a central axis:
florets in the head of a flower,
the arms of a starfish,
(but it is also a broad, flat fish, with a flexible skeleton and sometimes electric organs).

I will take what little comfort these definitions bring me now.

And also from a ruptured chrysalis.
Sometimes what seems like devastation is instead 
the miraculous emergence of a monarch,
starting from a central point
to fly a thousand miles, or even to infinity
on radiant wings.

— Maiz Connolly