Light
On rhythms, patterns, memory, emotion and time.
I feel it before I can see it. My body slowly warms with the rising ambient temperature of the room, the heat on both sides of my skin gradually building enough that I’m pushed out of a dream, teetering briefly in the sweet liminality of being just aware enough to hazily sense my aliveness but not yet aware of the story of Me and My Life, and all its continuing dramas and roles and responsibilities. I linger here and savor the simplicity as long as I can before the levees break and it all comes flooding back in — where I am, who I am, what day today is, what must get done.
Photons that sprang from the surface of the closest star eight minutes ago are now pouring in every portlight and hatch, painting the interior in geometric stretches of low golden light, which triggers a silent chain of internal events that brings my mammalian body into a state of alert awakeness. I track the subtle movement of the sunbeams across the teak walls as we swing slowly on our anchor to determine what direction we are facing within whatever bay we are in today (are we pointing toward the beach, toward the ocean?), and orient myself to the earth before I even rise to see it. Morning is here.
The rhythm of my days is the rhythm of our sun. The rhythm of all of our days is the rhythm of our sun, to be sure. But since moving aboard a boat over two years ago, the many ways in which my busy schedule and Extremely Important Human Things back on land used to attempt to override or ignore these earthly cycles have since faded into the horizon behind me, and these days, my body is unquestionably linked to the rotation of our planet underfoot, and intimately influenced by the ever-shifting tones of sky from dawn to daylight to dusk to night.
I have always been sensitive to light, and this hasn’t always been a good thing. Often, there’s too much of it, along with too much noise, too much commotion, too much sensory input that pushes my nervous system into unease. I have always been terribly perceptive to all the near-infinite combinations of shades and hues and shadows and brightness that easily color my mood, energy, or a moment. No greater offense to the senses exists than indoor lights turned on in early morning hours, the sterile glare stunting and shattering the leisurely approach of growing daylight with its urgency and severity. Except, maybe: bright overhead lights in a home in evening hours, accosting its victims with ruthless wattage after dusk has fallen and night creeps over the earth. Both of these have always been rude to me from a sensory standpoint, but I am only now beginning to see that they are also harsh reminders that we as a culture no longer move with the sun, we move with our schedules.
The most conspicuous and fundamental cycle that we are witness to and participant in on our planet no longer holds real relevance or significance for us. Where we once as a species lived entire lives in attentive awe and reverence of the rhythms of the sun and all that it influences and gives to us, it is now just hazy background noise, an inconsequential feature humming along in the periphery of our Extremely Busy and Important days.
When we were house hunting in Seattle many years ago, the only thing on my list was the quality of natural light, both outside and inside. Were there ample windows, were they good sized, what direction did they face? Was there a sunny area outside somewhere? I needed the sun. I needed it in my home (have I mentioned I’m allergic to artificial lights in daylight hours?), I required it on my skin. Turning my face into a sunbeam, even if just for a moment, was the only thing that could instantly banish the pervasive grayness that seemed to crawl over the earth like a vine in the wet winters of the Pacific Northwest, the kind that overtakes and overpowers everything, dulling every color, soaking into every bone. Light was medicine, transforming the world from a dreary and damp string of drudgery and grievances into a technicolor landscape of possibility and promise.
Our home now is a small sailboat that’s currently afloat in the Pacific, just a few miles north of Guatemala. Our days are spent almost entirely outside, where I am always in conversation with the sky and its full spectrum of colors and moods. And every evening, the sun puts on a show, and every evening, I watch. It begins its hero’s journey with its ritual descent into the ocean, the earth and my home in motion below, carrying me from the light and into into the dark, and as the sky yawns its way from vibrant pinks and golds into muted blues and cool yellows, I look up, and take in the full expanse of it all.
Maybe the sky at sundown seems so vast because the graduated tones bring a dimension that its daytime counterpart lacks. Maybe it’s because the first appearance of surrounding stars and planets reveal our small and insignificant place among it all. Maybe it’s because it reminds me of summer, when we would celebrate the gift of lingering light by moving our lives outside: dinners in the backyard and evening walks around the neighborhood and refusing to go indoors until the very last drop of twilight had left us. The long days felt boundless and open, like they would go on forever. The extended suspension between night and day tasted like freedom, like permission, like play, like I would live forever.
Four tiny, terribly dim and exceptionally warm-toned bulbs punctuate the four corners of our main cabin. I love these little lights, even though they can barely support the task of illuminating a book. Their too-warm tone casts a faint amber glow against the cozy wood interior that sweeps me away into the orange-tinted halls of nostalgia: Circled around a crackling fire and laughing under the stars on a balmy night, thawing our fingers and toes by the roaring stone fireplace while bare branches outside collect snowflakes, the few candles standing tall over a dinner table, barely illuminating plump tomatoes or beef stew while we talk about tomorrow across the flickering flames.
For some, scents are their shortest, most unexpected tie to deeply embedded memories. For me, the straightest line to all memories, the substance of how my body reads and stores each moment of my life is light. The layered cool hues of the sky just after sundown and these dinky little golden lightbulbs both somehow take me back to the moments where a certain shade of light not only painted the scene, but shaped emotion itself, securing the overwhelming sense that though I was little and the world was big, I was here, and I was held.
In this beautiful essay, L.M. Sacasas writes about the value of not only dusk, but the greater value of fully participating in any gradual transition in our modern world — an experience we seem to have lost entirely as we move from “one fully lit space to another until suddenly, harshly even, we turn off the lights for the night.” He writes:
Perhaps the urge to manage, master, or control as much of our experience as possible, and the unwelcome attendant consequences of such efforts, such as anxiety, fear, frustration, exhaustion—perhaps that urge arises in us because we have been insulated from the rhythms, phases, and changes of the non-human world. What I mean is this: to sit and observe the patterns of the non-human world—day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year—is to be reminded of how little depends on us, how much goes on without us, and how the world will carry on after us. Perhaps the anxiety of control emerges in us to the same degree that we blind ourselves to the rhythms and patterns of the non-human world, the same world, of course, to which we all belong.
L. M. Sacasas, The Convival Society
While I was doing some research on circadian rhythms and it’s ubiquitous existence in all living organisms from fungi to plants to microbes, Google served me an ad for a wearable sleep gadget and “health tracker”, and out of curiosity, I clicked through to see what it promised it could do for us:
I have no doubt this particular gadget offers great utility to some, and I pass no judgement on those who have or use it for any reason. But that we think that anything could be more clever, more intelligent, more perceptive than our own bodies is an assault on the very breath in our lungs. That we think that our being is a problem we must optimize and overcome tells me that we have fallen asleep at the altar of doing. That we might need a gadget to tell us how our body feels is evidence of a culture that has lost its way, that has lost contact with what made us, with what is here, with what is all around us and within us and above us all the time that we have decided we are far too busy to notice or care about. And the results of this manmade exclusion, of this newfound stance where we flatter ourselves more clever than the cosmos, of no longer considering ourselves as nature, are in: we are more anxious, overworked, exhausted, depleted, and lonely than we’ve ever been — and instead of reaching for a sunset, we reach for our phone.
We have constructed a temporal temple made of work and we revolve diligently around it, worshiping and evangelizing its backwards tenets: the purpose of our days is productivity, the value of our time is efficiency, the highlight of our freedom is distraction. The resources of our planet and our technological advancements all push us further from our nature and back into work, productivity and distraction, all over again — an artificial cycle that takes and takes and never gives. Our lives tick away under a manmade mechanistic structure of time, neatly delineated into discrete categories of months, meetings, days, appointments, hours, plans, tasks and minutes, as we check off one square on the calendar and move across the crisp clean line into the next square.
In the poetic words of Salomé Sibonex, we have fallen into the pattern of
obey[ing] man-made cycles,
checking and re-checking virtual worlds,
linking [our] hormones to headlines and screenlight
in place of humans and daylight
But when all of that is gone, what remains? While on multiple-day sailing passages, I get a glimpse at what happens when these components of modern life are entirely (temporarily) removed. An interesting thing happens to time when all social constructs and to-do lists and should-do lists and schedules have dissolved into the atmosphere and you are left standing bare underneath the sky for days on end.
What becomes startlingly evident as you spend your moments watching the sun and moon run unremitting circles across the sky with a momentum that does not stop or make distinct, instant transitions, is how liquid and unrelenting time really is. The pace is impressively swift but its incremental shifts are so subtle that its easy to see why we forget that its happening at all. We are passengers in a continuity of infinite moments in which there is no edge, no clear delineation, no tidy boxes, nothing except right now which is always on its way to becoming another right now.
It’s a realtime demonstration of the slippery and utterly fluid nature of not just time, but reality as a whole, and the ways our human minds attempt to draw rigid lines and boxes around it just so we feel like we have something, anything, to hold onto. We conflate symbols with the real thing, relying on artificial structures and invented concepts far beyond the point of utility, struggling to really fully comprehend our place within this immensity.
When the sun has bowed to the night and darkness inches its hold over the fields and mountains and the ocean slowly grows black and the four small bulbs in our cabin have been switched on, it’s sometimes irksome to not be able to see the colors on my dinner plate, but in here, I cannot fight against the night. In here, I cannot banish it away with wattage and lumens. The darkness isn’t just something somewhere in the background— it lives here too, in my home, alongside me, within me.
And I don’t mean within me, poetically, I mean it literally: the gradual dimming of the earth takes over both the atmosphere and the chemistry of my cells simultaneously, and once again, a silent chain of internal events is set off, moving my body into a state of drowsiness. I preserve my night adapted vision by flipping a dim red light on in our berth and I crawl into bed, eyes and body in harmony with the night, and though it’s still what my land-dwelling self would consider laughably “early”, my body doesn’t care about my schedule, it follows the sun, and I comply. Night is here.
Eventually I slide on my sleep mask — the fancy one that promises total blackout, so I can shield my senses from subtle sleep-disrupting shifts in nighttime light, like when the full moon spends hours silently sliding across the large hatch overhead that’s permanently pushed open wide toward the sky, spilling its nocturnal sunlight onto my pillow. As I settle into bed, my mind softly swirls with the story of Me and My Life, and all the continuing dramas and responsibilities I must tackle tomorrow. But bit by bit, the ocean stills itself, my mind stills itself, and it all fades away into darkness. Renewal is underway, the cycle repeats.
Here on the ocean I have learned a lot about what I thought I already knew. My modern mind has been illuminated by the ancient wisdom of my body. This isn’t to say that I don’t still have plenty of days where I’m buried in work or petty problems, this isn’t to say that I never reach for my phone when what I really need is the sun on my skin, this isn’t to say that I’m immune from the pull to distract and forget, and this isn’t to say that we must all move into the mountains or onto a boat to be able to remember. We just need to look up. After all, what good are our windows if we never look through them?
This is to say that when I feel lost, when I feel separate, when the stories of Me and My Life thump along with an urgency that overtakes everything, when days are nothing more than tasks and the sun is nothing more than background noise, when who I am and what day today is and what must get done outshines even the brightest full moon, when I need to orient myself to something real and true and important, what brings my feet back down to the earth unfailingly is an attentional shift to the chromatic prisms and sparkling spectrums of light that ceaselessly dance around us as we spin rapidly through our lives, through time, through space.
It reminds me that I am molecules, not a machine — and the rhythms that I am loyal to aren’t found on a blue screen, they are found in my bones, forged by the fire of the sun itself, intricately bound to the blues of the sky. It reminds me that days and nights lived in harmony with their light and darkness is a life lived in reverence to the greater patterns and cycles that govern everything that we know, that govern everything that we are. It reminds me that processes far, far more ancient than I are deep at work, are always deep at work, within us all. It reminds me how integrated my brain and blood and body and being is with not just our closest star, but to the moments in my life that made me, to life itself — to it all.
I am still learning how to listen to the light and to the ways my body reads it. And when I do, I remember that though I am still little and the world is still big, I am here, and I am held.
xo, Taylor
This is a free and public post, and if you enjoyed this piece and would like full access to all of my essays and reflections, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. $50 gets you an entire year of access, makes my tiny little heart explode with gratitude, and hopefully makes your life a little bit better.
The writing in this piece is almost lyrical, Taylor. ❤️ Gorgeous.
Beautiful. Always good reading and listening to you