All Kinds Of Light

Dawn begins with birdsong. No light is it yet detectable — any sun that is trying is caught in Sagg’s dense haze, Payne’s gray at best.

It is not yet 5 o’clock, so I stay there in bed and chart the morning’s hopeful course.

Now the morning is catbird gray, and as the light intensifies, so too does their chorus. Soon, it is too much to contain; the beautiful sound that had greeted me begins to fill with the business of feeding. Their work begins.

Now the morning is still opaque but lighter yet in hue — “elephant,” they call it.

We tend to break our time into just two halves, day and night. Day is when we can see what we are doing; night is when we cannot. I sleep, fully dressed, from night to midnight. The alarm is set.

I know, from being a farmer during a drought, that midnight is actually another segment of the cycle: a time where you can see, except that your vision is influenced by other sorts of light. It may not be accurate, but it is beguiling.

I rise from the sofa with the ease of a sleepwalker and go to my truck. The stars have never seemed brighter. The Milky Way is more than a soft mention.

In the eastern sky, where there are no earthly lights, the naked eye can discern the billows of the billions, stars upon stars upon stars. Constellations, the obtuse dot-to-dots, hang in accord, each of their “points” equally bold. They were named so they, the fixed spot in the heavens, could be remembered. At midnight, you see how starlight is really the most revealing light.

Now to the field, the terrestrial universe, where the light is that of the fireflies. There is a strip of land — the old asparagus bed that I did not get to plowing — beyond. I know the messy beds of perennial flowers and adjacent plot of buckwheat, left standing and undisturbed, is now host to the glowworms and their suitors.

The myriad rise and fall of so many gentle greenish strobes makes me stop to observe the searching glow from thousands of the tiny ships. From ground level to 20 feet, their presence creates a silent, magical impression. They do not illumine the darkness, but they move across and interrupt it, proving it proximal.

Just above their movement, the stars begin again in relative stillness, proving it infinite.