Glow in the Dark
Blue of dawn, and thoughts on half-waking
This idea starts in the dark: a thought on first waking, a thread pulled, half-asleep in curiosity.
Up with the dawn, it is in the dark silent stillness I can hear my thoughts thinking, stretching out slowly before the quick pace of the day. No cars on the streets to to compete with, no soundtrack of traffic, no noise from the train, no urgent mornings; no caffeine in the highway of my veins, yet.
I make my way slowly, tracing paces of waking across the familiar embodied line from bed to the small kitchen, feet slow against the uneven hallway, to the places where the wood heaves and creaks. The first sounds in the dark quiet of dawn are the histories heaving, the wood sinking and shifting — my noises, and neighbors’. In an unlit apartment on this quiet morning I look out, met with blue in the distance.
The window in the living room is a frame, the view holding two buildings across the horizon two blocks away. In the dawn blue, I perceive the faint far glow of their awake-at-dawn inhabitants. They, too, turn the lamps on, making their own light before the sun blasts through the day, emerging into dusk, into morning.
There we are, I think: each of us awake in the early light, none of us known to each other, each of us existing in our own early cocoons, here in the club of this early-to-rise. We are the constellations of morning, our rooms lit up by lamps like stars, our atmosphere this wild city. We are glowing from the inside out and the morning rises slowly.
Dark, blue, dawn like midnight: the early hours are a dark blue against the horizon, my favorite, like “The Blue of Distance,” where Solnit writes, that blue is “the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world,” a color that to me and many feels mysterious. The morning is blue, but dark and alive, a different blue than the sky after the sun rises. In this dark blue, this blue gray, this near black, a faint pinprick of unnatural red pulses, glowing on and off in regular rhythm in the distance: it is a tower, a building, a human-made mechanism and I realize I can only see this small glow, its rhythmic message from the dark sky in this dawn sky, and that when the sun’s light arrives this small red glow will fade away.
This time of morning, of deep, dark, navy dawn shifts slightly, telling of times’s passing — like the sky is black, indigo, ultramarine on a palette with white slowly blended in. Time builds, and the sky shifts, and with it comes increase in the sonic landscape: cars pass by in growing speeds. Neighbors wake, too, and tracing their own incantations of morning, their own footsteps across small distances, making their own familiar lines across their apartments. I hear their footsteps on the ceilings, their weight tracing a path across the starting spark of the day. Their own morning glow; everyone’s familiar waking.
On a Friday, in the blast of daylight, it is the afternoon and I walk west to the East River. I am pulled by a force that is the compass of my own internal longing — a need, drive, desire of the body, pulse of a feeling, nameless, a felt sense asking for nourishment and color and nature, one that rejects all need for explanation or logic and says just go — to the shoreline, to something natural, to something not a building, not a truck, not traffic; something glowing with life: grains of sand, the seagulls screaming and fighting over a fish below the surface, the long white line of the single swan, there each week, and the loons that seem led by her, floating as they follow. It is sunset, nearly, the turning point from light when the buildings of the city across the water start to glow, their outlines black and backlit against the horizon as the sun dips, the moment when the perceivable world turns to gold, orange glow, a heightened colorfield built up before the day releases into evening, and the navy returns. All along the dark water the sunlight glows. It radiates, moving; it glitters.
Creative expression feels to me like a glow from the inside out. Arriving like a small flame from the midnight dark, ideas are faint impulses, dormant often, growing in the pigment of soil of our own early dawns. Sometimes our expressions call to us and through us in logical form; while others, they seem to emerge out of nowhere, but the nowhere is the night, the fertile dark, the night sky, the dawn before morning. A story, a painting, a poem, a recipe, a song, a color, an idea, a creative seed takes form, each expression a moment of possibility, met with the ingredients of environment. An idea is a spark, tiny ember, a potent glow that exists in that exact moment where it can either take and turn to flame or fade away.
As we turn into the winter season, away from the autumn, can we nourish our ideas, let them spark and come to life? Can we maintain momentum? Do these ideas have what they need to grow, and if not, can we find what they need? Time, air, something to nourish it, a container within which to keep them safe. I look to the dawn; I think of this room, I think of this window, I think of the days going on endlessly, I think of ideas composting, going back into the soil, breaking down, starting over, taking on new forms, continuing. In this creative realm, regardless of its final expression, no idea goes to waste.
Now, the sun is out and high in the sky. The blue of day is the backdrop to cloud coverage, bright vivid blue, white gray wisps of cloud moving slowly across the horizon. This is a different blue than the dawn. The day starts, the drone of the radiator hums and hisses. It sounds like a noise band. As we arrive to each day, to the bright like, to the dawn’s early glow, let your stories glow. Encourage your ideas to emerge from the rich soil of life and slowly take form. Look out into the distant dark of the mornings when you can and let the glow of neighbors’ distant lights be a reminder of everyone’s interconnectedness.
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As we edge up against the solstice and the turning point to winter, take good care of your creative ideas, your life, and the communities that you’re a part of. What are you connected to? What are you creating? What are you protecting from this year, leaving behind? What do you envision or imagine in the season ahead?
PS. Solstice means it’s time for another seasonal writing session - sign up to be a paid subscriber and celebrate this transitional time on your creative pages.
Thank you all for being here, and for shopping over at Odette Press. Orders ship out until Friday, 12/22, and then resume shipping 12/26. If you’re inclined to gift (yourself, or others) experiences, check out the library of writing classes and in person experiences. Thank you for helping to keep this dream flame alive. Looking forward to a strong, resilient, generative, and creative year with you in the seasons to come!
nourished by, nourishing:
Here’s a playlist for drive — as in, car driving and traveling, or drive, as in “motivation and enduring”. Making soup, making calls for ceasefire, teaching the last of this year’s classes.
upcoming experiences:
12/21 Seasonal Session (recording)
1/2 Journaling for Intention (in person) (recording)
1/17 Beginner’s Journaling: A Four Week Series
