Indigo is the Evening
Visions of cities up close and the perspective of distance
Indigo is the evening. Gold are the glimpses of city that arrive with the twilight. Windows, backlit, electric, the office lights, highways, apartments, and homes — they’re all shining. I notice them first standing in the doorway of this new kitchen. From a distance this mystery emerges. I start to understand what all the longing is about: all the love songs, all the jazz songs, all the movies, all the talking. Here, the city. My view is new, and I am awestruck.
The city glows there in the not-so-far off distance. Dark night sky is charcoal mixed with purple, vaguely, and navy. Artificial lights are distant glows arranged in patterns too rigid and too aligned to be starlight. I think of unused offices, spaces, power grids, currents of electricity, and money, pouring in to these places keeping their lights on.
I stand there for a minute buzzing and grateful for this wide view. In the morning the sun will rise: bright, red, blazing, hitting over rooftops landing momentary on the sides of brick buildings. The morning comes up red, pink, orange — the skyline appearing to glow as the day turns blue.
For now, the evening lingers. In the daylight it would be easy to miss this mystery: the glowing gold of this varied city, ripe with its multiplicity, layers of life existing across multiple dimensions, surface levels and depths at once. I grew up on the ground in the Midwest and I often wonder what it’s like to live lifted from the grass, necks craning upward to find the skyline, to find your own windowed view, your apartment, high up there in the infinite sky ceiling. The thought alone arrives again and it’s dizzying.
In the daylight, these distances seem simple; It is the contrast of light in the evening that I find personally the most mesmerizing. The dark comes. The daylight brings an optimism after weeks of mostly gray, and yet I find myself yearning for the evening. I find the depths enchanting. Times of day highlight different things for each of us. I thinking here of what a student shared once in a class that I lead, reflecting on how the rhythms of her writing changed based on the light, based on the time of day that she writes — how the feeling tone she felt from the process glowed with a different quality of density, thought, and light based on the time of day she wrote, comparing morning to day to evening. Creativity encompasses, and needs to encompass, the full and wide and deep depths of our dimensions as living human beings. So we try writing in the morning, at night, in the middle of the day — and see how it changes our perspectives.
Perspective is what I’m thinking of as I wake up from the twilight into the bright view to start today: the perspectives or the lenses we look through, the shared visions we tend to in collective spaces, what we hold on to or see through personally. In art making, perspective gives depth, longing, closeness, understanding, a sense of bigness or smallness when constructing or creating an image. Flatten the image down to one plane and it does one thing; give it vantage points and it tells something entirely different through depth, dimension, and distance, in the practice of relating. The long view might give us longing; a closer view, a sense of intimacy. What do we notice up close and far away?
Seen from a distance, perspective can give us a sense of scale: an overhead view can show destruction, can show growth, like seeing life from a drone flying or a plane overhead. Up close, we see in a finer tune: wrinkles on shorelines and slopes of skin; contours and outlines of city skylines transform into each window, apartment, and brick; the seemingly stark absence of trees in a city up close shows the tenacity of moss growing in places where it miraculously makes its way through the cement. Perspective is connected to our sense natures, our practices of noticing, the options, the optics. What are you noticing here, now, literally and metaphorically? What’s there, off in the distance?
Perspective is what I go to my friends for, what I go to the woods for, what I go to the city for, what I emerge out into life for. It’s what I read for, what I watch movies for, and what I notice when listening to songs. I turn to friends — the ones who remind me of the wider views, ones who shift the focus for me when worry comes in waves. Empathy is a hand outstretched pulling you out of the current and a reminder to shift the view, the framing, the focus. Creative practice, too, is a way to help to ground down and think, “what have we not considered?” “How can we take this in from all angles?”
Later, in the flat distant blue of the day the sun rises, and I push up on the metal frame of the window in the shower. The water is running hot and the steam rises, the train in the distance. The cool air outside rushes in, opens wide, and clears the fogged view. Like a sunlit day on the mind, I can see clearly through to the city. Later, I’ll take the train to get closer and investigate.
For now, I savor this clarity, this wide expanse of now and possibility, balancing what I can see with what I wonder and what I don’t know yet — what’s out of view. In the stage of my mind I conjure up potentials. I’m learning to delight in the distance between here and there, the process. The steam comes again. I turn my view to this sliver of seeing and I squint, pretending the city skyline for all its wild harshness is the slope of a mountain. I open my eyes again. The view is crisp and it’s a city. I ground down. The water smells like grapefruit, like citrus, like eucalyptus, oils and plants hanging. I settle into my newest vantage point, take a deep breath, and take in the wide view. Bright is the wide sky, this vantage point, perspective. Blue and clear is the day.
upcoming experiences:
2/13 Online: Letter Writing
2/13 Online: Journaling for Love
2/15 Taste + Write: Meditating on the Senses
2/15 Suminagashi Basics
2/21 Ink/Play new!
2/21 Suminagashi 2: Meditating on the Landscape new!
nourished by, nourishing:
Reading | best american essays, though slow this week. moving again!
Making | soup, sketches, outlines. shapes around the neighborhood.
Enjoying | evening, of course, bright yellow, sunset’s tipping points