It’s dusk, and I’m sitting on my deck watching the fading hues of today’s golden light. The neighbour’s liquid amber lost half its leaves today, and it already looks ready for its winter sleep. The air is strangely warm now, as it so often is right before night settles in. The day-baked earth like raked over embers releasing heat into the evening breeze.
Only this morning, I was sitting here with a cup of tea, thinking how the trees in my garden are like sentinels lined up as they are in a row against the fence line. They watch me. I watch them. I hope my presence is as comforting. Their leaves dance now like little flags, lush and deep green on laden branches made heavy by autumn rain. I admire how they swell in defiance of the inevitable. One last push before winter unhooks and takes them fluttering to rest and rot and replenish the soil.
How is it that the earth seems most alive at these times amid the stillness of dusk? How is it that it’s at dawn and dusk when I feel the most myself? The day goes by, and I’m a puppet on a string, doing this and that, filling the hours with all kinds of busyness. Onwards through the night, pulled from dream to dream, waking in between to gasp at what might have been. It’s the bookends of the light where I find myself again. Like I’m a treasured novel put back in its spot on a shelf, my pages all worn and loved.
I sometimes imagine that when I die, it will be a montage of lived dawns and dusks that flash before my eyes. Peaceful and prophetic. Like following the road home after a passing storm, when the horizon seems like a living thing extending long fingers of golden light. I hope it’s like when I unexpectedly recognise myself in a mirror. Watching me watching myself right there, right where I am, and finding to my surprise, being in that moment, despite all the odds, profoundly happy and content.