After the Shadow Passes

&

If the end of us leads to
another form of light,
I hope it is filled with
wild, raw life
eating and singing and
defecating in streets of gold and stone.

I hope that light, a metaphysical
ark, surrounds and loves
the spirits of all departed things, and
the dodo can rest with the dinosaur
in the unkept gardens of unsaved saints.

My hope is not
the vague, colonial heaven
of pure materialism
I was raised to die for.

In my heretical middle
age, pagan echoes rumble, and
I know, in the heart of me . . .
A heaven without birdsong
is no heaven at all.

The Color of Light

I don’t trust my eyes to accurately mediate my world. My brain filters my surroundings and applies overlays of indifference and interpretation. I don’t see things with the same eyes I had as a child. Everything around me is drenched in my brain’s valiant attempt to match sensory experiences with memory. I want to see with new eyes.

As a small kid, I remember a yellow/orange world of incandescent bulbs and mercury street lamps. Most of the memories I have of the 1980’s play out with the same grainy quality of home movies. Has the light of my current moment changed since then, or merely my perception?

Small things like this invade my brain with more frequency now that I am a parent. I try to remember what it was like to NOT constantly obsess about bills and to-do lists. I try to return to how it felt to value play time over anything else, even eating. How is my son’s experience of the same moment completely different from my own?

Then I stumbled upon a practice. I asked myself,

How does the light look in this moment?

I try to forget, actively forget, how to interpret my surroundings and imagine it is my first time in any given space. I ask myself, how does the light look in this moment?

The light is golden around my wife’s hair, fading to a deep brown in the shadows. The air seems softer in the twin glow of lamp and television. I wonder if all light bends around the beloved heads of others this way, or if there is a quality to my wife and this moment that is truly unique.

When I play this odd game with myself, I am often delighted by how it pulls me from the stream of daily life. Like a swimmer resting for a moment on a quiet sand bank, I can see my surroundings with an almost childlike wonder. Even the beige walls and gray carpet of an office can create strange spaces for light.

Give it a try sometime. See without seeing. Ask yourself, how does the light look in this moment?

I pray it is healing and warm.