Golden light
The Joy of Golden Light
When I pass the open door of my eldest child's bedroom at 8am, the golden light through the windows lights up the world with optimism. And of course it's not the world so much as my heart that I'm talking about. My heart is softened and lightened by the soft gold light. And my world becomes softer, lighter in the magical glow.
It's an instinctual thing, isn't it? Like the way we feel like finding a cozy place when the days grow shorter. Or the way the signs of spring bring the sap up in us too.
I'm drawn to the mysterious way I interact with the world I experience. The way my experiences make me and my inner world makes the outer world. The line between outside me and inside me isn't nearly as clear as we would have it be.
If a Tree Falls in the Forest
It reminds me of the riddle: If a tree falls unseen in the forest, does it make a sound?
There is the normal, reductionist response that of course the tree falls and its falling makes waves of sound in the air for miles around even if no one is there to hear. But there is also a perspective from which the waves are only sound if there is someone to hear them.
And not just that, it matters which someone, and on which day.
To me it might be a fearsome sound. What if someone is underneath? On a larger scale of danger, are they replanting? To a forester it might be satifying - the sound of a cleanly cut tree falling in the direction they planned, preserving all the useable wood. For a farmer it might be impatient. Or the sound of shoes for their children. What if it is the last tree felled before retirement from a job they've always loved. Or the felling of a great and beautiful tree in order to save those around it from elm disease.
If these are different ways the sound can be heard, is it really the same tree?
Of course it is. And yet, the worlds of the people who are hearing it are different enough that the trees in those worlds are different. The experience is a different one for each of us and we can have no real understanding of what the others' experiences are.
And it is also true that on a day when the sunshine warms the carpet outside my daughter's room, a tree falling is less worrying to me and I experience it with a feeling of brotherhood. The death of a tree is the natural cycle of life and death, like gravity, to which I am also subject.
Colour Analysis
I'm going to see a Colour Analyst today to get my colours updated. The idea is that she, being able to see me more clearly than I can (with all my judgements and expectations of myself), is trained in discovering the colours of clothing and make-up that best set off my natural colouring. Not to make me look like someone I am not, or airbrushed, but to look most like myself on a good day. I had my colours analysed ten years ago. Perhaps I will write about what it did for me another time.
Since then I have gone through cancer treatment and menopause so I look very different. My hair dye got too dark so now I have hair that is grey with white 'highlights'. My skin and eyes are used, half a century old. Like a piece of 60s wooden furniture, my kind body is patinated with use.
I can regret the wrinkles, looseness and age spots and use miracle creams and surgery to pretend it's not true. I could fight against my own appearance, tell myself if I tried harder, spent more money, bought the newest marketing ploy, I could be one of those ageless rich women who seem to be thirty-five for ever. But I prefer to accept what is and be gentle with myself. I prefer to let go of the impossible dream of looking twenty-three again. To let go of the impossible dream of never getting old. To let go of the impossible dream of immortality. To appreciate and embrace what I am now, while I can. After all, if fate grants me a tomorrow it can only make me older still.
How to make a day happy
What I didn't tell you is that, it being early morning on a January day in England, the sunlight is not warm. It is, as usual, a cool damp grey. The golden warmth comes from the intense yellow paint on the walls of the room. But the heart lift is the same even though a second later I know perfectly well it's fake. A heart-lift that transfers to the kettle-boiling and pill taking and the dressing and eating and exercising and writing that come next.
It won't last of course. That is the way of things, but what could be wrong with seeing how it lifts the spirits, and giving us the gift of it by making sure the door of the room stays open?
I am blessed with a child who knows how to make a room happy. There is no need to question whether the warmth is authentic, when the happiness and gratitude certainly are.
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