Shifting Light

It was a bright night washed in moonbeams to an almost daytime shine, and I was tumbled into wakefulness when the rumble of a distant train unleashed the agitated voices of a caucus of coyotes. I closed my eyes and an image came to me of the earth spinning in space, but more than spinning, I could feel it breathing.

And more than breathing, I could feel it pulsating, pulsating with a billion prayers, and many were of thanks, but there were mostly supplications, and they merged into a kind of music that was the yearning of humanity throughout all time, reverberating through the universe.

But I had no desire to be awake and unmoored in the night, even listening to the music of the spheres. These were dangerous waters, I knew. I tried to navigate away from the undertows of fear and avoid the straits that always lead to sadness.

I thought about light: The moon spilling itself into this room. Sunlight in a garden. The blank open brightness of the Southwest. The muffled gray light of Chicago in November. Headlight beams on a lonely road. The warm lamplight seen through the windows of houses I have not entered. Shooting stars. Fireflies.

“All I ever wanted was to paint light on the walls of life,” said Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Me too.

Summer has ended. Yesterday I waited at the exit from Gaviota to the 101 for a break in the traffic as a stream of Labor Day travelers drove past, many in recreational vehicles or carrying kayaks or bicycles or ATVs, an endless procession of vacationers returning to their everyday lives. Now, lying in my bed, hoping for a return to sleep, I remembered a summer from my childhood on Coney Island Avenue, when my sister and I set a towel and a pot of water on the sidewalk and propped up a rain umbrella and sat there pretending we were at the beach. People looked at us and chuckled: such charming little pauper girls, a beach so near but so unreachable to them.

Those hurried pedestrians missed a lot; there were small treasures even in the gutters here. Once I found a green lens from a broken pair of sunglasses, the perfect window for a tiny house of scraps, though I never built what I imagined in my mind, and there were bottles to gather and redeem for coins, and one lucky day a perfectly fixable red bicycle sitting out with someone’s trash. Brooklyn summers.

I wonder: do people still sit out in the night talking on stoops, roofs, and fire escapes? Were those streets as innocent in the 1950s as they seem now, looking back? I used to wish I lived in a house with a big front porch on one of the shady side streets. I never imagined I would live in the country, within sight and sound of the sea, my sleep interrupted by coyotes.

What was I dreaming about before I awoke? Maps and train fares. Trying to find my way home. The kindness of strangers, and some sort of museum. New York City again. Suddenly I remember riding the subway in 1967, looking at a poster of a long-haired girl running through a meadow filled with daisies. It’s an ad for shampoo, I think, and I am a long-haired girl myself who smells of shampoo and probably spearmint chewing gum, and I am wearing white fishnet hose and a swirling pastel watercolor dress -- lilac, pale green, aqua, an Age of Aquarius kind of dress.

Later, my friend Rosemary is standing on a corner in the Village biting into a large green apple, and a man walking by says that apple is bigger than she is, and she smiles (the way she used to smile) and the same old moon is rising above the city, and we will all grow up and forget about each other.

Much later we might learn of early deaths and inexplicable outcomes, or perhaps we will receive a mundane update surprising only in the number of years that it encompasses, because we honestly forget we are this old. And it’s big, this growing sense of being temporary, really quite a lot to process, especially in the middle of the night. So many things remain in need of understanding. So many things remain in need of being done. "The great courage," wrote Camus, is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death."

But the light in the heart of the night is hard to look into.

Thank God for that sky grown faintly mauve with morning now and the shape of things returning and resolving themselves. The leaves of the lilac on the deck are suddenly illuminated, and there is the comfort of cows grazing on the soft brown hillside, and the caw of a loud-mouthed crow. A bowl on the kitchen table is filled with tomatoes from the garden, heavy as grapefruit, and the light in its early autumnal slant is a sigh holding hints of prayer and promise. 

I think of these words by Pico Iyer, one of my favorite writers: "...everything falls away from us - the light, the dark, the warm afternoons-- and all we can do is cry out in affirmation of our joy."

Breathing hill, I will walk to you.