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Category: light

Labyrinth

Labyrinth

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Last night the pavement unfurled like a gift. It caught my feet and led me through the dark. It gave me room to breathe.

Earlier in the evening, October fireflies crawled up from the ground, blinking as yellow as the road marks I wrote about yesterday. If the fireflies could do it, so could I.

So I donned a headlamp and reflective vest and took off down the newly lined road.

The air was cool on my arms; it had the weight of summer air. It buoyed me as I strode past lamplit houses. It calmed me with its passage.

Last night, the road was my labyrinth.

Eerie Light

Eerie Light

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I was braced for near darkness when I stepped out of the office yesterday. What I got was far stranger. It was one of those cloudy late afternoons when the light has no discernible source, and it throws you off balance. The low rays are supposed to slant over buildings west of the bus stop — not seep from the north, south and east. Removing this vital cue confuses and unnerves. Is it almost morning or almost night?

Only one thing to do, and that is hurry. Book it to the bus stop, hop in, zoom away. Once to Rosslyn, though, the light was even stranger. Big banks of clouds were forming over the river and the light had a greenish cast. If this is Eastern Standard Time, you can have it. 
Luckily, it was totally dark by the time I arrived above ground at Vienna. No more eerie shimmer. Now just the glare of headlights heading toward me. 
Chasing Daylight

Chasing Daylight

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Yesterday evening I arrived home at my usual time, but it was almost dark. Some clouds had moved in and mist was making it worse, but these were footnotes to the main event, which is that we have far less brightness to go around these days.  My after-work walks are all about chasing daylight.

To find the time I must plot and scheme. If I leave the office right at 5, I get the 5:10 bus, which puts me in Rosslyn at 5:20, which means I’m on Metro by 5:30 and to Vienna by 6:00, then home by 6:20 or 6:30. That gives me 15-20 minutes before total black-out.

There’s the morning, of course, but that means walking in the darkness and the cold — before the eyes are open and the air is warmed. And then there’s lunchtime, but if I want to leave at 5 I can’t take a lunch.

I can fold walking into my day, get up and move around the office more, walk up and down the stairs, all of which I do. But I miss my long, stretch-my-legs rambles.

Just one thing to do: make the best of weekends and work-at-home days and shuffle around the other constraints as best I can. In a little over two months, the days start getting longer again.

In the Dark

In the Dark

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One of the things that pulls me into the office early is the ability to work in the dark for an hour or so. It’s so calm here in the lamp light, the overheads quiet and still. Desks and file cabinets are dim shapes. There’s a fuzziness to things that allows for slow absorption.

This morning it’s even cozier because of the rain. With a bit of imagination I could be working in my living room, lit only by the glow of a computer screen.

But soon the switch will be flipped and light will flood the room. The desks and file cabinets will jump to attention.

I’m steeling myself already … but with any luck I have a few more minutes in the dark.

The Light, Again

The Light, Again

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I stopped walking this morning long enough to take this shot.

“I almost did the same thing,” said a neighbor, running past me in the opposite direction. The light would have slanted in a bit lower through the tress when he passed this tunnel of green.

Not that I’m complaining about the angle I got to see. Seeing light pour through the trees first thing in the morning reminds me that there is more on heaven and earth than we can ever comprehend. We’re lucky if we have eyes to see and a lens to capture. But the light is there for us even if we don’t.

Grace, Visible

Grace, Visible

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It was early and I was walking, lost in thought, lost in sad thought if you want to know the truth. I looked up and saw a shaft of light piercing the shaggy tunnel of green that this stretch of Folkstone Drive has become.

There it was, brightness distilled and condensed, channeled from the heavens to the earth. Usually we can’t see sunshine because it’s all around us, a blessing we tend to ignore. But when it slants through the greenery as it did this morning, it reminds us of its presence. It comforts, inspires and motivates.

When I was young I used to think that grace was the dust motes that floated through air. I’d heard that grace was invisible but all around us, and dust particles fit the bill. Today’s light shaft is a better candidate. It was, at least for me at that moment, grace visible.

Porch Light

Porch Light

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An early walk this crisp morning as the day took hold and porch lights still were burning. What a cozy beacon is a porch light, what ease and relief it promises. A welcome to the late arrival. A comfort to the sleeping suburbanite.

Yet it also says, this is our place, this cone of brightness our bulwark. Come closer if you dare, but only if you know us. And if you know us, show your face.

Otherwise, slap your newspaper on our driveway, stuff mail into the box. We do not reveal ourselves to everyone. Only to the those for whom the light burns.

Mountain Light

Mountain Light

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Days of rain and clouds broke up yesterday just as we were leaving the West Virginia mountains, and I got to see light from all angles and perspectives: the way it pooled on roads and hillsides. How it filtered through leaves.

Here it is in the woods and on the trees.

And high up in the canopy.

To Capture Rapture

To Capture Rapture

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Underlit can mean inadequately or poorly lit — or it can mean lit from beneath. As in these trees, glowing from within, it seems, though drawing their light from the setting sun.

They shine like this for only a few minutes each evening, and woe to the photographer who thinks she can bounce a few more minutes on the trampoline before snapping a shot. She will be disappointed. 
Because it only takes an instant for the light to drain away, for the trees to move from emerald to forest, to lose their glow, to become ordinary.
But this night, I stopped bouncing, climbed down off the contraption, ran inside and grabbed my phone. It’s difficult to capture rapture. But that’s what I was trying to do. 
Reflections

Reflections

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I just finished reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, a big-hearted book that picks you up and carries you along with it. It took me to the Africa I visited two years ago, to the sights and smells and bribes and chaos of Nigeria, just one country east of Benin.

And it took me to an America where newly arrived immigrants braid hair in low-end salons,  hoping for a break, a toehold — anything to avoid being sent back.

And finally, it took me to the book’s own beginnings.  In the Acknowledgments, Adichie thanks her family and friends, editor and agent. She thanks the latter in particular for “that ongoing feeling of safety.” And then — she thanks a room — a “small office filled with light.”

It’s a twist on Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own,” but singles out what for me is most important — the light. I type these words in a light-filled space of my own: windows beside and ahead, glass all around, reflections of reflections of reflections.