Learning to See the Light

Is it really true that sunlight is more beautiful in some places than others? I am stunned into silence by occasional flashes of radiance, yet I spend most of my time completely unaware, in the dark, so to speak. Is it my noticing that makes it beautiful? How many moments am I missing?

Physics would say the properties of light don’t change. A stream of photons travels as a wave, and if its length is right, I see the light. A wavelength of 500 nanometers equals green, never red or violet. Slip below 300 or above 800, and no human eye can see it, no matter how beautiful.

But the physics of a thing is not the perception of a thing, and many tangents cloud or clear perception. Light travels farther through the atmosphere during its morning and evening commute than it does at noon. The angle bends tighter at the top of the globe, latitudes shrinking as they travel north. Our axis tilts, seasons give or take away. Summer splashes, winter hides. The air may be thick and humid or windblown and dry; glittered with dust or cleared by rain. Clouds might be bulbous white, a flat of gray, or broken into strata like window blinds. Or entirely absent, allowing a span of horizon edge to edge in blinding blue.

Light responds to setting, too. Canyon cliffs bounce it back in echoes; the surface of the ocean swallows it whole, shimmering the air with no discernible source; a canopy in the deep woods lets nothing hit the forest floor; cities of glass stand tall and glare back at you, inanimate, immovable.

Or is it because everything is beautiful after kissing my love, and light just happened to be the first thing I saw?

If the throw of light is more inner presence than outer passing, then the seeing is internal, and that stark flash of sunlight on the cliffs, the water, the trees, the glass and steel, did not create a scene “out there.” It filled my inner atmosphere and lit the glittered dust floating in me. The moment was created by us both, light and sight together. Light offered me a gift and I accepted by opening to this unique spot, this one angle, this precise mood and circumstance, marking an impression no one can ever replicate. In our mutual gaze, I want to believe I’m loving the light and the light can love me back.

I’m a mental person by nature, and I’ve spent many years in my head, tumbling questions, trying to figure out how life works. I want to know – what makes it possible for the world and me, sunlight and dust, to create such delight? I want to understand, to know for sure, to pin it down, because part of me thinks if I could know the why of beauty, I might be able to stop its opposite, mitigate the cruelty of its absence. But even as I voice this wish, I realize the beauty of precious things is their ephemera. You can pin the wings, but the flit of a butterfly is too elusive to be reduced. It’s only in recent years I’ve learned there’s a limit to mental understanding. Explanations entertain, but they do not transform. And it’s transformation I have wanted all along.

So what leads to transformation? Well, I’m still trying to figure that one out. But I have a growing sense it includes surrender to the beauty itself. If I pay attention, the flashes come more often, and if I linger with them, I start to feel we are co-participants in creation. When I hold it gently, the flashes lengthen and settle. I understand it less, but enjoy it more.

Photo by Khamkéo on Unsplash