On Watching the Light Change
This morning, for just a moment, the light in my living room was fantastic.
The Japanese Maple out our front door has fully leafed, to use leaf like verb, to say, like I will, that a tree has leafed-out. The now-there leaves were one part of this morning’s light show. There was also a wind and an hour slanting through its branches just-so, and they cast a hundred little wavering circles onto the wall above my kids’ toys and potted plants. It was the first thing I saw as I sat where I always sit for coffee, the light there to remind me that this morning was like so many others and yet different. The wind stirred and made the light-dots move like flashing scales, like large-scale glitter, like sediments of bright sand stirring beneath a stream. It was magic, right there in my living room.
I’m often caught like this by a certain light. Once, fantastically, I watched each bit of leaf-light coming through an elm turn into crescents on the pavement during a total solar eclipse. But I’m talking here about more ordinary moments of light. The beams of rose-butter sunset that cut through my house after I put the kids down these days. The bright, bright contrast in the clouds around a thunderhead. The light from a stained glass window coloring the wooden pews in a church. I try to stop whatever I’m doing to give each one of these light moments the attention they deserve. Undoubtedly, I’ve missed so many more than I’ve seen, uncountable moments turning like small fish in shallows.
Recently, I saw a painting by a southern artist of a sunspot falling on a chair. That was it, the entire subject of the painting: a sunspot. And I was so happy he captured it. I knew, immediately, that me and this artist were kindred spirits, though we’d never met and were unlikely to do so. Because I knew that sunspot. Or felt like I did. Felt the image of one square of light collapsing onto a chair come back in a composite like a thousand angles of a loved one’s face. Which is, of course, the power of art — the rhyming we feel, the bone-deep ring, the joy when we find certain truths reflected back to us in unexpected places. The connection regarding ordinary moments in a living room.
It’s no surprise that a painter would be taken with the light, would make it the whole point of taking a brush to a canvas that day. But I’d submit that we each have the capacity to be so moved by light. I know—I know—that’s a tough ask in our busy world. But I wonder how it would affect our days if we would sit in one place long enough to watch the light shift, would keep our light-sensing antennae attuned, would look up while we’re driving on the freeway or walking the trash bins out to the curb.
What am I proposing for you to do with it, with that miraculous little moment of light-noticing? That’s for you to decide. But I can tell you that by the time I sipped my coffee and walked down the hallway to change my clothes, the glitter sediment on my wall had stretched onto the floor and lost its motion.