January light

This is a season of beginnings, a time of new starts, fresh slates, hellos.  As I ran today I thought about the ways it is also a season of farewells and of endings.  The days are so short now that we have only hours of full-blown daytime before we begin the descent to sunset.  Before we say goodbye to another of our days, acknowledge the passing of our lives.  More than any other time of year, the majority of our hours now are spent in darkness, bumping constantly into endings and goodbyes.

Maybe because of that scarcity, the light this time of year is beautiful, but I also think it is sad.  January’s light has substance, weight: it is no mere adjunct to my experience of the outdoors.  Instead, it has a physical presence, oozing like thick syrup over winter’s dark branches, golden, but full of the endings of things.  The light illuminates, often brilliantly, the barrenness of the landscape.  It glints off of snow, sparkles off of ice, glows like burnished copper on walls through windows.  On a snowy or gray day the light is a dirge, on a clear one, an elegy.

At sunset, sometimes, I can see the sun radiating as though from below the horizon and I feel as though if I stood in one place and spun around I would see 360 degrees of that lambent, ephemeral light.  It feels as though the whole planet has collapsed into a bowl, and I feel physically aware of the palm of the universe that holds us.  The space and heavens that surround us feel palpable; the sun’s beckoning from beyond what we can see or fathom suggests the presence of something there.

But I also feel the tension between beginnings and endings, animate in the light on snow, in the slow-and-then-startlingly-fast descent of the sun past the horizon, in the light’s stark illumination of black branches against achingly saturated bluebird sky.  Endings and beginnings collapse into each other, light and dark blur, sunset and sunrise become interchangeable, confused.  We know intellectually that the earth has begun to tilt towards light again, but see no tangible evidence of this yet.  And so we must trust, and love the light, its beauty equal parts promise and loss.

7 thoughts on “January light”

  1. I love this evocation of, and meditation on, winter light… the light of my childhood, the light on the snow in Ann Arbor when I was trudging forever to and from some cinematech and the transporting screen-flicker fueled by the dim sun of a churning projector… Bergman’s winter light lapping at my own winter light.

    Now I gaze out my office window at the pink orange fade of an LA winter sunset, knowing that come summer my office will be awash with light so blinding that I have to jump up and close the blinds against what today is a darkening winter hour.

    Meanwhile, my father-in-law’s gifted watch is being watched by me, so I can tell Vlady, the tremoring watch-guy with the magnifiying monocle, just exactly how much time I’m losing every day. Namaste

  2. “We know intellectually that the earth has begun to tilt towards light again, but see no tangible evidence of this yet. And so we must trust, and love the light, its beauty equal parts promise and loss.”

    What we know intellectually is often, too often, so different from what we feel. And so there is that vexing impasse in which we must make sense of the collision between reality and dreams, promise and loss, light and dark.

    Rich. As always.

  3. I am overwhelmed with emotions reading this writing. As we run into those goodbyes, we must keep in mind that each goodbye is hopefully followed by a new hello. As long as we keep the hope in our hearts, minds, and souls, we will get through the goodbyes.

  4. Reminds me of that song: In the bleak mid-winter/Frosty wind made moan/Earth stood hard as iron/Water like a stone…

    I think you were in my head yesterday. When I woke, it was -4 degrees, there was a crazy mist over the mountains and the trees were sheathed in ice, looking as if they might crack open. I kept looking out the window, marveling at the light. But somehow, it made me feel sad, too.

    Gorgeously written.

  5. Just yesterday Big Boy and I were out building a snowman as both the color and the quality of the January light changed. Suddenly we were bathed in something heavy, blue, and otherworldly and we both had to stop to try to make sense of it.

    A beautiful piece, Lindsey.

  6. Yes, the light seems to come and go so quickly. Unfairly. While here, it’s as if it is distorted from it’s regular shape and color, and when it leaves we feel colder, and maybe a little helpless?

    I am already waiting for Spring. For light, for more time in my life. I can’t seem to get anything but the basics, the bare essentials, completed during Winter.

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