Standing in a Sea of Light

We live in a sea of light.

Henry Plummer

What you are always looking for is the perfect "hallelujah" sunrise or sunset, a fleeting interval that catches you by the throat, leaves you wide-eyed and breathless and stammering, tosses you up in the clouds and then tugs you down again, wraps you all up in wonder and elemental grace, if only for a moment or three.  When such precious scraps of time come along in life, you remember, oh yes, you remember.

One loses count of the mornings and evenings spent in wild places, always looking for that perfect Helios moment and trying to capture it on film or a memory card. Whatever else she forgets (and she forgets so much these days), sunrises and sunsets have a lovely way of lingering, and so they can be revisited over and over again.

I look back and remember the light, how it filtered through the clouds on a fine summer evening or glowed through the last of the treebound leaves in autumn, made the shoreline sparkle on an early winter morning or touched the wood of a old Adirondack chair on the beach, painted a shining highway across the water from here to there.  Following the memory trail, there I am on the beach again, sand and waves rippling under my bare feet.  The distance between now and then, between these shores and those beyond the clouds seems like just a few steps.  How wondrous it all is.

Going through photos toward the end of a calendar year is always an interesting exercise - so many years of pottering about with a camera looking for the light, and nary an adequate visual representation to show for all my ramblings and mutterings. Sunrises and sunsets are perfect within themselves. The artist has a lot of work to do on herself and her technique - perhaps one of these lifetimes she will get it right.