WHERE THE LIGHT PLAYS

This morning when I stepped out the door onto the deck on my way to some garden work I was surprised at how bright it was out there-- the light itself was different, then I looked around the corner of the house and saw that two of the paddies across the road had been flooded since yesterday.

Like the paddies downmountain, these were now as blue as the morning sky and as bright, and as I set to planting my own plants I thought about how every year around this time the entire mountainside becomes a mirror that remains as bright as the sky for a good while after all the paddies are flooded and the mountain becomes the sky's reflection, even at night when it fills with galaxies.

This goes on until the rice is planted, when the sky of the mountain greens with growth each day as the stalks replace light with life, the mountainside turning toward imperial jade at the pace of growth, the ambiance changing as well all along the days as the light travels at vegetable speed, which is quite a switch, and stirs calming perturbations in the spirit, itself a matter of light that takes much of its nourishment from beauty and transition.

The habituated mind as well is reminded, as it steps out onto the deck blithely thinking all to be just as it was, and so comes to re-realize reality. Which is beneficial, by and large, and happens often out in the countryside, where light plays and grows, like widening rings in water.

WAITING FOR THE LIGHT

On a drive down to the lakeside road early Saturday morning, I was waiting for the village traffic light to change when I saw a boy on his way from the train station to the junior high school, also waiting for the light to change.

He was standing there alone in his world, as we all do at such times. Wearing his sports uniform, apparently on his way to practice, he began to do incipient teenagey things: wriggle one shoulder, then the other, making his uniform fit his new body more perfectly, then flicking his head this way and that to fling his hair into the just-right random position, then fingering his forelock to casual perfection, tweaking his posture, fiddling with all those things I remember fiddling with back at that age, not possibly decades ago.

Leaving the uneasy edge of certain childhood and entering the bewildering dawn of the outer self-- what a journey that was: standing this tall for hours in front of mirrors, pursuing the unattainable form in the ideal shirt, perfect pants of precise fit, these shoes and no others, all of a style that would last forever, every waking moment the focus of a new-life look at this historic and invaluable instant: gleaming shoes, hair combed per minute, rat-tail comb in pegged pants back pocket, as I recall in flashes...

Then three junior high girls from the train came up quietly behind the boy and stood there at a discreet distance, remaining silent lest he turn and behold them and then what, and began doing the female version of the same choreography of hair care and mini-twerks, not one of the four wondering, any more than anyone does at that age (and beyond), "What is causing this odd behavior? Why am I doing these things?" These are not questions we get to ask, or even conceive of-- until perhaps decades later, while maybe waiting for the light...

Cultures are formed around these cosmos-driven, reflexy things. If we were placed in full charge of them we would never have evolved this far, let alone have developed the simple, cogitative, aggregative sapience that evolution has permitted us, assuaging some living need in us to deal - if only in a limited way - with such fundamental concepts as sex, subsistence and society, all of which we're still having global problems with. We are new to this, after all; as a species, we're not even out of beta yet, really...

Those tweaking, flicking, twerking kids are doing big work.

Rainbows All Day

The day looked like no surprise. It was cloudy and rainy like yesterday, the day before and the day after tomorrow, but at this time of year that's no surprise around here, as the fall of summer chills into winter over the brown, sleepy earth.

But then came a surprise at one point early in the gray morning, when I looked out the window grumpy at upset plans with more rain before my eyes, and saw the brightest, finest, clearest rainbow I've been privileged to behold in a looong time, right inyerface in the dark north, stretching in jeweled glow from lake to mountain, broad and intense as light alone can be in a perfectly faceted moment. There are few perfect moments of any kind, but this - magic in the darking rain and mood - it was like suddenly living more life than a moment ago.

The arch of colors we can see (and colors we can't see) was low to the ground from the angle of the sun, each tint clear, yet without distinct edges of beginning or ending - like the rainbow itself - of the sky, yet apart, without edges, like the colors as they came from gray sky somehow to red > orange > yellow > green > turquoise > blue > purple then sky again, journeys of light I saw as a performance, each color flowing into the next...

As the day went on and the air grew even darker, time after time I looked out the window with less and less dark a mood, and each time I looked  there was another skyheart rainbow out there in a slightly different place, the light itself in a fine mood, brightling all the way to dusk.

My rainbow quotient is filled now, and with no effort on my part, a reward for just looking out the window now and then into apparent gloom, with a kind of hope the sky gave me. Even telling of it brings smiles to granddaughter faces...

Rainbows all day will do that for you.

While there Was Light

The Trio of Brio - Kaya (12), Mitsuki (10), Miasa (10) - came over for a visit on Sunday, and when in the afternoon I came downstairs from my editing work in the loft for a break to investigate the unusual silence I noted that while Miasa was doing the intimidating mound of dirty dishes generated by the youthful hunger crew, her sisters were nowhere around. I asked her about that, and she said - with no sign of solo-dishwashing rancor - that they were outside somewhere, playing.

In the continuing oddness, despite all the open doors and windows I couldn't hear a single kidsound from outside, a rare situation with the Trio around, so I went outside barefoot - just gonna be out there a minute - and found Kaya hunkered down on the suntoasted evening road with the big binoculars at her eyes, trying to focus on Mitsuki who 100 yards or so down the mountain was jumping up and down and side to side, I guess trying to make herself more interesting or harder to see.

While the two went on with their optical gravity visualization experiment (I didn't ask, knowing I wouldn't understand the response; anyway you don't bother focused experimenters) I just stood there and looked around-- the whole blue sky up there like a big robin egg shell lit up from the outside, the mountain arms around reaching out, shadowed and unshadowed, in the rays of the sun now behind the peaks; the darkening blue lake smooth as the sky, sparkling with boats; the big island beginning to glimmer with fisherman house lights and the same beyond, disappearing into the mainland; behind me the sheets of last clouds turning from pale gold to mango before the dark and the stars; about then the girls gave up on the binocs and grabbed the garden hose, began watering themselves and the locality...

I just stood there turning and turning, bare feet cooling in the flowing water, while there was light.

GRASSES OF THE FIELD

In this still evening the air is soft-- yesterday's cold, but with a new warm edge we can feel in our animal selves as the barely rain falls. The long wild grasses now draping the mountainside, grasses that wore the color of dying leaves back in autumn, and in winter - where they edged from the snow - were dead grey, this evening have a remarkable goldenness that reaches from within, a power they have always carried, that isn't life, exactly, but isn't death either - that says in the darkling hours that life is returning, that there is no edge to being: simply wait-- new life is here, has never left.

Even in what we deem death there are things to be done in ancient, hard-learned ways; thus the grasses glow in the early rain: they have evolved, seeded, grown, seeded again for this purpose too, among the countless others, and teach us of our own purposes, in lives we might view simplistically as regrettable aging toward regrettable cessation. For us, as for the grasses and all that lives, there is function everywhere along the line of life-- before, alive and beyond. As in the grasses of the field, the line is always reaching further than we can ever know at any once; in our way through life we are immeasurable, especially within.

Nodding gold in the faintest breeze, the blades go on glowing until all is dark, for now...

EYE OF LIGHT

Among the many reasons for living in the naturally rich countryside are the continuous surprises of beauty it brings out for show when you least expect them.

This morning I was anticipating another chill but clear day; instead when I woke up and looked out the deck was covered with snow and the snow was still falling-- no motorcycling down to the station, have to go by 4-wheel drive.

So not much later I was steering down through the entire white, the tall mountain bamboos arching snow-laden over the roadway, when all at once I saw where Hokusai got the ocean waves design for his famed Mt. Fuji woodcut: there they were, ocean waves in the snow on the leaves of the bending bamboo, that he could copy at his leisure, with some colory tweaking for waterness!

Then turning a bend in the road in the thick part of the woods where the road opens out to a view of the Lake, the vista was all one silver thickness of snow: no lake, no sky; but there at one point was a line of burgeoning light that as we slowly descended began to grow into the form of an eye, an eye of pure, soft brightness that was the sun coming over the far mountains and reflecting off the still invisible lake: a skyful of softly falling snow with an eye of light at its heart.

Took that vision with me on the train.

THE SONG OF BREATHING

The rain arrives in the early night and comes down hard in the dark, all the louder for being unseen; after a time the air grows cooler as the rain drifts away on softer and softer notes, when from a tiny sound swells the insect chorus until it replaces the song of the rain that has gone, all those lives had been waiting out there to sing again into the dark, sing to each other each their own song, the same song we carry, in our own version, in ourselves, that we cannot always hear, but it is there-- we move to it even unknowing, responding in our light to the song of breathing, the song of heart beating, the song of walking, the song of loving, of dancing, we put them in our poems, we dance them to our moves, we sing them with our lives, or try to, when the rain has passed...

BRIGHT IDEA

The other middle of the night I was coming downstairs fresh from dreams in the total dark like I sometimes do for a change of pace at that 3 o'clock in the morning of the soul that F. Scott Fitzgerald spoke of, only without the hangover, when my seeking eyes at the heart of the dark were caught by a gleam of light, in a sensation somewhat like having a small but bright idea.

How attracted was my gaze by that bright but tiny glow, that only point of absolute undarkness! I stood mystified a moment at the bottom of the stairs, studying the phenomenon of such a single dot of brightness in all that deep dark, wondering how there could be a reflection in the window when there were no lights on in the room; there were no stars for the clouds, there were no streetlights around here. Moreover it was a greenish reflection; even moreover, the light seemed to be moving!

There in that countryside mid-night dark and silence it was eerie, mysterious, suitably rural for the genesis of myth - the finest mythology originates in the countryside - I suddenly realized that yes, it is that time of year: it must be a firefly! Trapped in the house! I had to set it free, let it go outside!

I went over to the tiny light and saw that the firefly, shadowed by his own light, was walking up and down the lower part of the window, texting for any interested female that might be in the vicinity, but I couldn't tell whether he was inside or outside the glass, since he was turning himself on and off as he moved up and down.

Then as if to answer my question in the simplest way possible, when I tried to get some close perspective on the matter my forehead struck the glass with a suitable but unexpected bong in the night, like the forgetting of a small bright idea, the shock of which caused the firefly to lose his footing and fall to the deck-- outside, where he lay still turning on and off. I remember being that age. Problem solved, question answered.

And I just had a small, bright idea, about a myth...

WHERE LIGHT PLAYS

That bit of a haiku I posted yesterday was prompted when I stepped out the door onto the deck in the morning on my way to some work in the garden and was surprised at how bright it was out there, the light itself was different, until I looked around and saw that two of the paddies across the road had been flooded since yesterday.

Like the paddies downmountain, they were now as blue as the morning sky and as bright, and as I set to planting ginger I thought about how every year around this time the whole mountainside is a mirror that remains at max brightness for a good while after all the paddies are flooded and the whole mountainside is sky, even at night when it fills with starlight, until the rice is planted and the light of the mountainsky diminishes day by day, week by week as the rice stalks grow and replace light with life, the whole mountainside changing in shade toward imperial jade at the pace of a rice plant's growth, the ambient light changing as well all along the way of the process, light thus traveling at vegetable speed, which is quite a switch, stirring interesting yet calming perturbations in the spirit, itself a matter of light that takes much of its nourishment from beauty and transition.

The habituated mind as well is reminded as it steps out onto the deck blithely thinking that all is just as it was, and so perforce comes to do its job and realize reality, which is good, by and large, especially out in the countryside, where light plays... and grows...

DARKNESS NIGHT


Tomorrow night is No Electric Light Night for those of us in on it in these parts, when we will use only candles and lanterns and show ourselves and the kids what darkness is and means, how much a part of life it is and true, and how familiar it can be and not to fear, so much has been forgotten of where we were and whence we came and how--

Already it recalls to me one moonless night while we were living on an island off the coast of Spain, out on a point with the ocean at our front, with no electricity, not long after we'd moved there - with only one candle to cook by and eat by - there was a knock from the dark at the dark door, it was an elderly man without light who had come round the point from the sea and had walked the long dark path up to our candle to ask the way to the village over the mountain, and would go hence into the night and over the mountain without light and how would he see, I city-wondered.

Before long we too were walking over the mountain along stony paths even on moonless nights, seeing fine by the light of the stars and the ancient light-finding strength that had been in our eyes all along unasked for, and so never received until now. More than ever, we need to learn what darkness has to teach us that we do not know we already know, from long before our own lives. We should share this knowledge with our children, that the world may be the simpler place it is, both day and night--

DARKNESS NIGHT II

Darkness, as one might expect, is a lot darker out in the country; it's pretty much actual darkness out here where we are, except for a small light out on the island and a few sprinkled far across the Lake that go out one by one as night deepens.

Until a hundred years ago, city and country everywhere were pretty much the same at night; now the city has a 24-hour day. But though we all know this, even out in the country what has been lost to us with the loss of the dark tends to slip the mind when one has recourse to brightness at a switchflip. Easy light has made us lazier than we know, has let us drift from attentions we were born to give to the darkling edges of our lives, it has taken us farther from the forebears in our eyes and from 99.9% of our evolutionary history. Living in familiarity with darkness is in fact fully natural to us.

So it was like seeing an old friend last night when we came home to a dark house, went inside in the dark, lit some candles, a small kerosene lamp, and proceeded to prepare and eat dinner. Kaya was quiet, more thoughtful and studious of distances than her usual brightlight boistery night self. She was intrigued, instinctively contented with this new face of things, the space closing around her like a soft blanket. The food was different, the faces were different, the rooms and the house were different. We talked about darkness and history; we talked about how you don't have to be afraid in the dark, because in fact you can see in the dark: see?

We talked about how humanity had until just a few decades ago always been familiar with the dark and lived in close adherence to the cycle of dark and day, and how loss of the night must have deeply affected us humans, who have evolved through eons in bond with the natural cycle of dark and day; how light has changed us, how dark has changed us, and how the loss of one-half of that equation must have unbalanced us in ways we do not know.

We noted how things had a new beauty when shaded by the night, acquiring depths that light cannot contain, that only its absence can provide, and how without electricity conversation gained importance and intimacy. For her part, Kaya watched the candleflames flicker and smiled with an ancient, familiar delight.

Darkness was good.

(From two PLM posts of June 2003)

THE DAILY LIGHT

Had a big frost last night, to let us know in the clear blue morning that there's a genuine winter around here somewhere, so what a show there was at sunrise. Not long after the golden messenger got high enough to broadcast the early edition of the Daily Light, every leaf and needle of every evergreen exposed to that warm announcement, every papery leaf of the drooping bamboo was painted with light that danced in the barest morning breeze. From the tip of every leaf hung dewdrop ornaments of all the colors, the sunsides of whole mountains of trees shining as if dipped in a rainbow. Through the trees against the horizon you could see tiny glimmers of violet, gold, silver, green gathering at the leaf tips, sparkling on a breeze too light for skin to feel, flashing through all the rainbow colors as they grew and wavered in the moving air, swelling and swelling until it came their turn to drop a quicksilver bead splashing rainbows through other leaves and to the ground, where the white of the frost still waited down in the shade for the touch of day.

What a show. Fortunately I had a ticket.

MORE LIGHT

...like all living things a fire is a river of need, a kind of conversation, a dialog of light with darkness, like the fire in the sky and in a leaf. The heart itself is a flame, ablaze at the sight of itself in another eye; we carry all this like a sky in ourselves, and so when we come to tend a fire, we find that delight of meeting an old friend. Just stir this bit here and the fire flares up, fuel once starved for air now fed, from ember to flame, setting new thoughts alight.

Tending a fire is the whole soul's delight, much like tending to life itself; in return the fire shares more than light and warmth, if we listen to its ancient tongue, for it speaks a language that lived far before and lives yet within us: This is the way you should tend yourself; this is the way you should tend others and your world. The fire is that of us outside ourselves. We recognize this naturally, as we do in the light of stars.

When we gaze into a fire's light we gaze into a shifting mystic mirror, upon vast and untold secrets of ourselves. What we find there we feel to our depths, but cannot say.

From the PLM archives, January 2003

SOMETHING AKIN TO SPRING

Freewheeling down the mountain these early mornings through the old dun landscape of winter - and in the old dun mindscape of winter - I suddenly sense a change ahead, something there... new... around the curve... the light on the leaves is different... I slow--

I round the bend, to behold a startling brightness laid out right on the ground where there was no such thing yesterday; "it's the same color as the sky," says my old dun mind, "with some sunlight and clouds in it..." it's a flooded rice paddy, the first of the year! And there's another patch of sky over there, shining on the dark earth... and one more there in the distance...

Each morning I go through the same new startle to the old winter mindscape as more and more patches of light are added to the quilt of sky piecing down the mountainside, day by day transforming the mountain into a creature of Spring-- and greenleaf summer to follow, nature willing.

There at the bottom of it all shines the Lake, aquamarine set among brown winter mountains and faceted with light in the same way as the paddies - dappled with clouds, now and then stippling in the morning breeze - and I feel in myself something akin to Spring, new life rising from a winter mind. In my day-to-day awakening, I too mirror the season and its sky.

MORE LIGHT

...like all living things a fire is a river of need, a kind of conversation, a dialog of light with darkness, like the fire in the sky and in a leaf. The heart itself is a flame, ablaze at the sight of itself in another eye; we carry all this like a sky in ourselves, and so when we come to tend a fire, we find that delight of meeting an old friend. Just stir this bit here and the fire flares up, fuel once starved for air now fed, from ember to flame, setting new thoughts alight.

Tending a fire is the whole soul's delight, much like tending to life itself; in return the fire shares more than light and warmth, if we listen to its ancient tongue, for it speaks a language that lived far before and lives yet within us: This is the way you should tend yourself; this is the way you should tend others and your world. The fire is that of us outside ourselves.

We recognize this tacitly, as we do in the light of stars. When we gaze into a fire's light we gaze into a mystic mirror, upon vast and untold secrets of ourselves. What we find there we feel to our depths, but cannot say.

REAL RAINBOWS

This bright morning I traced a rainbow that arched from somewhere around Steve's house all the way to Mt. Hiei, and stood there swimming in the vision. We get full and long-term rainbows all the time out here, as compared to the couple of minutes of barely distinguishable portions of arc we used to get sometimes in the city, kind of faded and archaeological, like an artifact that disintegrates on contact with modern air, such as that is, but these arches of light we see against the mountains and the Lake are real rainbows, rich ones, wide ones, full ones, all the way from here to there, pots of gold everywhere, from violet to orange with all the in between, and you can't help but stand and ponder (unless for some criminal reason you're in a hurry) that you can't find the edges to the rainbow (but the rainbow is distinct, isn't it; yet it isn't, is it), and none of the colors have an edge but they too are distinct but not, which leads you to realize as you stand there, fully rainbow-minded by now, that this small band of colors we are vouchsafed to see is but a small segment of the infinite stretch of vibrations there are; that sound and gamma rays are of the same continuum, as are all other 'waves,' including us, and why in the world should we see only this little bit, would it be too much if we could see it all; and in a way we're seeing with our ears when we hear sound waves, and hearing with our eyes when we see light waves, and hearing/seeing with our skin when we feel heat waves, all part of the one continuum we chop up into different senses; and in the very same dark-age way that we used to think the world was flat and the sun rose, so we still think our senses separate, our perceptions isolate and all distinct, 20/20, and at the edges where only the senses get fuzzy begins the dogma...