Fireworks

Catching how the restlessness of light makes all things glimmer…

From "The Days to Praise: Anticipation” (preceding post)

Several years ago, I was still able to walk far enough to leave the house. However, my distance was rapidly diminishing as my condition deteriorated. I vividly remember my last walk. The line of poetry quoted above crystallized from out of that experience.

It was a late November evening. My walks had become short and difficult. I could no longer go far enough for them to count as any form of exercise; it truly wasn’t worth the physical risk of taking them, and therefore they’d become sporadic.

When I did venture out, it was only because I missed the air, the moon, and the stars – and sheer visual distances. Something, anything, beyond my walls and my windows shuttered against the migraine-inducing sunlight. For about a year, my bizarre condition had come to completely exclude sitting, and even required all kinds of positioning props for lying down. So it was either take walks or be totally housebound.

That November evening, I’d been outdoors only a few times over the prior two to three months, and it had been about three weeks since my last outing. This time, I only got as far as the end of the driveway before I saw I’d have to turn back.

I realized with reluctance and a momentary sense of unreality that this would be my last time out. If I couldn’t walk any further outdoors than indoors, then the increasingly tricky task of getting myself up and down the steps really didn’t make sense anymore. With my walking distance steadily decreasing, I’d end up getting to the foot of the stairs and having to turn right around to struggle back up!

Knowing this would be my last time out while still struggling to accept it and make it real, I paused to look around before heading back up the driveway– and was amazed. The streetlights down the road, the yellow windows of houses across the street, one lit with an early Christmas lawn ornament, all seemed to throw light so finely that the night air appeared radiantly granular. It was dark all around but it was light all around, as if the darkness glowed.

In the back of my mind, I was aware that this scene, viewed with less hunger, was not just ordinary but drab: a dank, overcast night on a middle class cull de sac with cookie cutter houses, one of which featured a tacky luminous candy cane!

But it was my last time out; it was magic; and it left an indelible impression.

The darkness glows.

And when the night is cloudy
There is still a light that shines on me
Shine until tomorrow
Let it be.

- The Beatles, “Let It Be”