Nourishing, life-giving, ever-changing light, rising and setting, arching across the sky, silvering the waxen edges of the leaves of the oak tree, flashing up the spine of a single blade of grass, its resplendent presence on the sill of a window, its ability to penetrate a room like a sharp object or to diffuse through a space like a fragrant rose, the unceasing play of natural light expresses something that cannot be described by lumens and light meters alone.
The movements of the sun and moon mark our most basic experience of time. Their conversations with objects in the landscape give us our most immediate understanding of space. When we are outdoors, beneath the immense canopy of limitless space we can feel the power that these heavenly bodies had on our ancestors. The cycles of light and darkness, warmth and cold, and the occasional confounding eclipse, drove the unfolding of early human culture, as they still drive us today.
When indoors, the movement of light through the window and doors, skylights and clerestories, calls us to expand, reminding us to participate in the ebb and flow of the universe. Growing and diminishing, flowing in and out, the light and the view through the invisible glass, nudges us along in a constant refreshing of our experience. Each and every sunbeam, like the DNA in every cell, contains the blueprints of rainbow. Whether we notice the light or not, whether we treasure those cosmic messengers or walk right on by the pool of light blazing on the staircase, it brings vitality into a structure, animating the interior with warmth and with color, providing our most basic, ongoing connection to the cosmos.
And oh how it changes, nudging us along to explore the fullness and levity of being. Blue sky sunshine animates, bringing a sense of clarity, growth, and opportunity. The flat, grey light of the rain storm encourages us to slow down and reflect. The veil of night and the darkness turns the view from the window back inwards, bringing the undercurrents of our experience up to the surface. Moonlight, the universal symbol of intuition and the divine feminine, slips across invisible thresholds with its contraband of dreams.
Rising in the east or setting in the west, warming the tiles in the south facing kitchen, or shielded from the family heirlooms in the north facing den, filtering down through the branches of the redwoods or sneaking beneath the eve of the porch, bent by the curve of the earth or bounced along the undersides of the lavender, predawn clouds, glinting off a windshield or swaddled and diffused by the morning mist, overwhelming the colors in the heat of a midsummer day or stretching out the muted tones of winter’s creeping cold, in its full radiant splendor or its silent meditative absence, the natural light that illuminates the world, so too, illuminates something in each and every one of us.