The Quality of Light

My day follows a routine as constant as the tracks my feet have worn in the grass; that's part of life on the farm. Taking care of animals requires patience, diligence, and attention to detail, but you find yourself with a lot of time for idle thoughts. Lately, I have been thinking about the different qualities of visible light. The sun is 91.875 million miles away from our peculiar little planet. The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 metres per second exactly. This is one of the fundamental constants of nature, as stable as the Earth's orbit and a staple of physics. Eight minutes after a photon is emitted from the sun, it hits home. And from there, it changes everything it touches.

There is the gentle, rosy radiance of an early spring morning, when the first rays of the rising sun are softened by delicate shrouds of fog which creep through the newborn green grass. The light has an ephemeral beauty but only a faint touch; it is not yet strong enough to drive winter from the air. Everything about a misty spring dawn is fragile, gentle, new -- even the light.

With summer arrives fierce warmth as well as illumination. The trees come into the fullness of their leaves, exploding into innumerable shades of green. The bold sunlight peeks through them with sly, stealing eyes as the wind makes their boughs sway and snap. The ground is dappled in shadow, limned in light. In the evening, the yard is awash in a lazy golden haze, the air heavy with the whir of dragonflies. Everything is gold and crimson, even me.

As summer turns to autumn, sunlight sets fire to the changing leaves. An implacable chill is creeping into the air day by day, but all around me blazes a bonfire of leaves in flaming red, glowing orange, and luminous yellow. In the early mornings, bright beads of dew outline the spiderwebs which pop up like fairy pavilions in the grass from late August to the first frosty weeks in November. The evenings are all cool hues of purple, the shadows deep and long.

In winter, the light becomes a hard, cruel thing with a wicked edge. When the first real frost comes, the yard and surrounding forest are clad in glittering diamond dust. Everything sparkles with crystalline intensity, causing me to squint as I walk to and from the barn. After an ice storm or heavy snowfall, the sunlight shatters into a million fragments of color. Frost twinkles in a fine coat over the old tractor and skims the surface of the horse tank. Even my breath glitters. Flowers may sleep beneath the snow, but their colors are born again as the sunset soaks the snowdrifts with pinks and reds and golds.

Sunlight and moonlight. Silver glinting off the surface of running water and gold staining the horizon at dawn. The hard, aluminum light of a daytime eclipse and the dull, angry haze which follows a wildfire. There are a thousand, thousand qualities of light, and as the days grow shorter, I cannot help but reflect upon them all.

From 91.875 million miles away, the sun not only provides light and life, but also a chance for an ordinary place like a farmyard to dazzle. It gives me the opportunity to see my world through a different lens, to find beauty in the unexpected places, and to experience a soul-warming gratitude for my place in the cosmos. Out of all the places in the observable universe, I am here, bathed in all qualities and moods of light.

And I am grateful.