Sometimes the light…

This morning in my dining room I skidded to a stop, turned around, headed to my office, and grabbed my camera to bring back to the dining room.

Sometimes the light…

stops me in my tracks. It is magical, mesmerizing, glorious,  and surprising.

In photography we often say, “It’s all about the light.” And often it is. The right kind of light invites us into the frame and the wrong kind makes everything harsh and ugly. There are so many different kinds of light.

George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, said, “Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.”

Beyond photography  there are so many references to light and the soul. Sometimes we think of light as good and darkness as evil. But darkness is necessary in order to recognize light and vice versa. Neil Douglas-Klotz says in The Hidden Gospel, “Darkness Shines. I want to emphasize that the shem-light includes all vibration, from the slowest to the fastest, from the most dense waves to the most expanded. It includes what we normally call darkness, and what physicists now call ‘dark matter,’ the stuff that makes up most of what we know as the universe… The experience of shem connects one through sound and vibration to other living creatures and to the whole cosmos.”

So in my life I am working I try to

Recognize and accept light and dark

as necessary parts of the whole. Though I am drawn to light I now notice how the darkness informs the light, shapes it, completes it.

Last night I headed down to the east side of Medicine Lake to watch and photograph the sunset. What a beautiful way to end the day.

“Still, what I want in my life

is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—
that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.”

― Mary Oliver, House of Light

Then I headed home and saw this in the sky from my own front yard.

Notice the light today and then complete this sentence, “Sometimes the light…”

May you walk in beauty.