The last light of the day is often the most beautiful, as the sun goes down in a blaze of glory. But to enjoy the sunset you have to be able to also welcome the night.
What is your favorite thing about long winter nights?
4 thoughts on “The Last Light”
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I love that it’s dark when I’m trying to sleep. In the summer, I have to fall asleep while it’s still light out and stay asleep past sunrise. I find that difficult.
I love candlelight, Christmas lights, starlight, and moonlight. That sounds like it’s all about the light, but it’s not – the dark around the light is at least as important as the light itself, and their interplay is my favorite part. The first two I associate primarily with winter holidays, but the second two are also more available when nights are longer. Summer theoretically has fireflies, but only when it’s really late and I can’t afford to miss that much sleep.
Receiving the awesome beauty of a sunset, painted anew everyday, also reminds me that nighttime is a reception of sorts, too. Some nights are cuddle worthy in the embrace of another, or a warm flannel quilt and the sweetness of the nights goes by far too quickly from last nod to early light. Other nights are troublesome as they gift me with new answers and eventual release from revisiting nightmares. Like life, however, all is to my benefit as I receive the evidence of power higher than my own.
Martin, I am drawn to your words about “the dark around the light” because it seems an excellent metaphor for the darkness in my life. Most of the time I have a mental image of the light surrounding the darkness, believing as I do that light really is all around us. But somehow when I am in a dark place the darkness seem so huge that the light feels impossibly far beyond my reach. Now, during my dark times, I will have that candle image of the light as central and the darkness extraneous. Thank you.
The glorious sunsets that fill the sky with blazes of red, orange, purple, apricot, plum colors are a wonderful prelude for me to the coming of the dark night time. I often think that the colors could be a great inspiration to weavers when designing a creative piece of woven beauty. Then when dark envelops us, outside seems threatening to me; In the dark, I search for the right place to step; I watch for obstacles that might make me topple, but once I’m inside, then I feel the coziness of being there, safe and sound.