Have you ever sat at a campfire and looked into the forest around you? Try it sometime and you will see just how dark a forest can really look.
An overabundance of light, especially artificial light, concentrated in one spot, blinds a person to everything that is not directly under the beam of that light. Even within the sphere of influence of the campfire, spotlight, desklamp or overhead fixture, unnatural shadows are cast. Things appear not as they are but as they might be under an artificially produced scrutiny. Vision is more obscured than assisted.
I have been in Boston for some time now and the family I am staying with, most especially my friend's ex-husband, are dependent on artificial light twenty-four hours a day.
This month has been gloomy. The sun has not shone more than three times since June began, so people make the argument that it is necessary. Still, I get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and find dining room and living room lights blazing and more often than not, two or three different light fixtures turned on at once in the bathroom itself.
It is hurting my vision both in physical and metaphorical terms.
At home, I use artificial light only when it is necessary and as time goes on I find it to be less and less necessary. With the exception of reading and cooking, there really is nothing that requires a focused artificial light source, nothing you cannot do or see better by natural light, even when that is only moonlight, than you could with a lamp or fire of any kind.
Things show you what they really are by natural light. Not what they might be under incandescent's yellow cast or flourescent's shuddering white aura.
God please spare me from thinking the light I cast on things, the perspective I see when I look with that focus, is the real light. Let me remember the shadows and the clarity provided by sun and moon, time and movement - life lived under an honest source of illumination.
Grant me clarity and grant me just a few more days of compassion for this man who does not seem to deserve it because I know, in the long run, nobody does and so we all do.
Get me through this overlit, blinded, dark time.
random thoughts on the passage through an ordinary life.
About Me
- Stephanie Farrington
- I figure if there's an average person, it's probably me. That is to say, I have lived in a few places, probably about average, I have a post-secondary education and an unfinished MFA - which is probably average for people who pursue and education, I'm hitting middle age, my job has been downsized and resized so many times it's safe to say I've never had any job security. I live an average life on the precarious edge of the middle class. I'm happily married to an American, I hold Canadian citizenship, for now. But I'm so disgusted with just about everything going on in Canada that I may pursue changing my citizenship to match my husband's. I am fiercely loyal to American ideals, in part because they make sense and in part because I am descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The idea of an equitable democracy, a meritocracy - that appeals to me. I write, I read, talk, take pictures and worry - just like everybody else. The hopes I hold most dear are for the health and well being of my immediate family, myself included, and the continuance of my happy life with my wonderful husband. Everything else seems manageable.
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