Writing the Light
Glow of the Season, City, and Evening
I start this crossing a flowing street. The night is gray black. The sky void of all indigo, ash absent any blue, and I have no choice but to rhythm with the downpour. Evening. Under ashen sky, the moment is charcoal covered in water. Puddles, street lights, electric signs. Water takes the city and softens. In the corner of the street where rain pools, the surface of the water is a mirror catching yellow green gold of neon signs, reflections rippling out where the rain drops down. I glimpse the glow. I soften, too. Mercurial, the distance transformed between neon sign and water. The moment is a spark. Weather takes gold paint and smears it across the evening. Sigh of relief.
*
I realize I am writing light when I catch a glimpse of the moon on a night train in the biting cold going to the city from Brooklyn. Moon is a dinner plate made of porcelain, with a candle burning behind it. A circle, whole, full. Each glimpse is a rhythm of awe against my heartbeat, warm glow between the punctuate of buildings. Again, again, again. Train car, dusk sky, apartments. Moon glow is a staccato, a song of light and silence in the night sky for anyone listening. Again, again, again. A study. A meditation.
*
An insight is a match lit. It takes insistence, momentum, friction. How, in order to write light, I crave to feel it. To write light I need to see it in the waning clouds of a thinning evening, and smell it in the memory of the hottest days of August, and taste it in lemon skin and and orange skin and feel the almost hurt in bursts of citrus, and feel its absence on ash sky days. A balance beam, a flame, I realize, this moment of straddling the season.
*
A week later, and sky is indigo and still. Nearby, restaurants, bars, neon lights. Night bites I shake and the cold takes the feel from the edges of my feet. I laugh and for a minute there’s a glimmer: I look to the sky, and there it is still, and there it is blue, and there is the moon, and there is a breath, and there is this light in the sky, mystery of glow orbiting, a rhythm, and a light a reminder repeated of the tether between body and nature. This same moon pours warm, radiating out across the global night.
*
To seek something. To look for light. To notice the evening. I write to slow and stretch out across a year, look to the days lived, and notice a sliver of time in bright contrast to a continuum of infinity. To pause is to gather up gold. To pool together. To notice is to slow down, light a candle. Take a match. Find friction, heat, momentum, and make a flame. I gather up days, memories, bead them on a string. I unravel them like lights. I plug them in. I watch to see which are shining, dead, flickering. Noticing. The season comes and I surrender.
*
On the drive home, traffic frozen, I catch a glimpse of sun. Sky is wide, and in the mirror, a gold orange glow, and daylight is sipped by gravity into evening. I glimpse the day turn the color of nostalgia.
“Be a lamp,” Rumi writes. “Be astonished,” Mary Oliver instructs. The light turns green.
*
Evening again, and freezing and across the aisle, the train stops and inhales. A couple blows in; two leaves carried in on the wind. By now we are at the midway point where the train lurches across bridge, across water. Mid-laugh, one gasps, inhales. Look at the gold, look at the buildings. Metallic — I told you, one says. A moment suspended. Watch the reflection, the buildings. Orange, effusive. A finger, insisting on the horizon. Look at the sunset.
*
I realize I am writing about light when the memories from the week start to string together. Puddle, neighborhood, moon, daylight. Each moment a spark, a burst, an asterisk. Each asterisk, an instance of brightness. Each day stringing together sounds and streams of light, each night a silence. At dusk, the city unfolds. Lights across the river are pinpricks, an insight’s insistence, a reflection, and the evening is still. I sit down to write. I untuck the wings of life, and leap. Gusts, carried out on the horizon: study, practice.
For Your Practice:
This week, write. String together the moments that glow. Write about the moments of contrast, of evening. Write about your favorite stretches of sunlight and your days. Make a list of memories; hang them like bulbs across the line of string in your mind. String them together, watch how they glow when you plug them in. Take in the year wide like a horizon. What are you noticing?
Nourished by, Nourishing:
Recipe writing. Glow of the evening. Moving, again. Morning runs, and more rain. Listen to this playlist for December.
From a Past Season:
From the Studio:
