Mama Says Om - Light

Sunrise and the morning light moving like honey across the ash trees in the garden behind the little blue house in the village, the sun going down in flames over the western shore of Dalhousie Lake late in summer, the last rosy fingers of the setting sun as they lingered on the rocks and trees along the shoreline.

It has been years since I sat on a rock and watched the sun go down on the north shore of Lake Superior, but I remember each and every one of those childhood (even toddler) sunsets as though they happened yesterday, and I revisit them all the time, still completely dazzled and entranced by the astonishing Algoma sunsets after all these years. A bone deep craving remains, and I would pack up and return in a heartbeat, but most definitely not in winter. Watching the moon come up on those wild northern shores was an equally incandescent experience.

Oh, the colours, the movement, the warmth, the sheer flaming magnificence of those performances at dusk. Every night, the sun painted a shimmering trail across the water from itself to me and invited me to visit, every night, the icy cold (even in midsummer) ripples moved in a circle (or spiral) dance around the old rocks, and every single wave meeting the shore was shot with gold.

We are light ourselves, forged from the dust of the stars, and I often think that something within us still longs for the light from which we came, to know our origins somewhere out there in the vast and ancient starry deeps. Our craving for for light and incandescence goes way beyond words and images.

Written for the incandescent mamas at Mama Says Om.