Light

It is spring equinox today. Today is the day when our sun has caught up to the rest of the world, and for all intents and purposes, we have the same amount of sun as you.  But tomorrow, ah tomorrow, we’ll have more than you (unless of course you live in Resolute or Grise Fiord, or lie hidden from the world in Alert or Eureka).  For the next six months our part of the earth is tilted towards the sun, the light season has truly begun. In a couple of weeks it won’t really get dark here, by the first week in May the sun will not set, and every day the light, and the qualities it gives to the land and everyday objects, will change.

I speak often about the light here, for the light is as much a part of the landscape as the mountains. More so perhaps, for it makes our mountains look different every day. As beautiful as Quito is, their mountains stay the same, while ours grow and shrink, and the sky behind them changes in colour and shade everyday of the year, light season and dark.

The poem this morning on The Writer’s Almanac was perfect for today, a perfect way to celebrate the light. The light that we now have more of.

Light, at Thirty-Two
(by Michael Blumenthal)

It is the first thing God speaks of
when we meet Him, in the good book
of Genesis. And now, I think
I see it all in terms of light:

How, the other day at dusk
on Ossabaw Island, the marsh grass
was the color of the most beautiful hair
I had ever seen, or how—years ago
in the early-dawn light of Montrose Park—
I saw the most ravishing woman
in the world, only to find, hours later
over drinks in a dark bar, that it
wasn’t she who was ravishing,
but the light: how it filtered
through the leaves of the magnolia
onto her cheeks, how it turned
her cotton dress to silk, her walk
to a tour-jeté.

And I understood, finally,
what my friend John meant,
twenty years ago, when he said: Love
is keeping the lights on. And I understood
why Matisse and Bonnard and Gauguin
and Cézanne all followed the light:
Because they knew all lovers are equal
in the dark, that light defines beauty
the way longing defines desire, that
everything depends on how light falls
on a seashell, a mouth … a broken bottle.

And now, I’d like to learn
to follow light wherever it leads me,
never again to say to a woman, YOU
are beautiful, but rather to whisper:
Darling, the way light fell on your hair
This morning when we woke—God,
It was beautiful. Because, if the light is right,
Then the day and the body and the faint pleasures
Waiting at the window … they too are right.
All things lovely there. As the first poet wrote,
in his first book of poems: Let there be light.

And there is.