Perhaps because they are so much themselves, wild landscapes remind us of the unsearched territories of the mind. The light over a landscape is never a simple brightness; it is mixed and muted. Clouds love to play with light. A cloud can suddenly introduce shadow and reduce a glistening field to an eerie grey space. Or alternatively, a cloud-shadow can modulate the depth of colour a hillside receives. This alternating choreography can turn hillsides purple, green or even cream, depending on how the angle of light and the cloud’s shadow conspire with each other. The visual effect is often breathtaking. Light is the great priestess of landscape. Deftly it searches out unnoticed places, corners of fields, the shadow-veils of certain bushes, the angled certainty of stones; it can slink low behind a stone wall turning the spaces between the stones into windows of gold. On a winter’s evening it can set a black tree into poignant relief. Unable to penetrate the earth, light knows how to tease suggestions of depth from surface. Where radiance falls, depths gather to the surface as to a window. The persuasions of light bring us frequent mirrors that afford us a glimpse into the mystery that dwells in us. Sometimes in the radiance, forgotten treasure glimmers through ‘earthen vessels’.
The earth is our origin and destination. The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows. When we emerge from our offices, rooms and houses, we enter our natural element. We are children of the earth: people to whom the outdoors is home. Nothing can separate us from the vigour and vibrancy of this inheritance. In contrast to our frenetic, saturated lives, the earth offers a calming stillness. Movement and growth in nature takes its time. The patience of nature enjoys the ease of trust and hope. There is something in our clay nature that needs to continually experience this ancient, outer ease of the world. It helps us remember who we are and why we are here.
The beauty of the imagination is that it can discover such magnificent vastness inside a tiny space. Our culture is dominated by quantity. Even those who have plenty hunger for more and more. Everywhere around us, the reign of quantity extends and multiplies. Sadly the voyage of greed has all the urgency but no sense of destination. Desire becomes inflated and loses all sense of vision and proportion. When beauty becomes an acquisition it brings no delight. When time seemed longer and slower, the eye of the beholder had more space and distance to glimpse the beautiful. There was respect for the worlds that could be suggested by a glimpse. A striking illustration of this can be seen in the traditional cottages in the West of Ireland. These cottages were often built in the most beautiful landscapes. Yet the windows were always small. There was certainly a practical rationale behind this. There was no central heating then and there was a lot of rain and cold. Yet a small window exercised a discipline of proportion in relation to the external beauty. It never offered you the whole landscape: instead, from every angle you looked, it chose from the landscape a unique icon for your eyes. The grace of limit suggested more than your eyes could visually grasp. But times have changed. People who now build here insist on huge windows that flood the house from every side with landscape. If one inquires about the particular rhythm of the place or the patterns of light the owners often seem baffled. The total view detracts from the eye’s refinement.
T
HE
B
EAUTY OF
O
PPOSITES IN THE
L
ITURGY OF
T
WILIGHT
IN THE WEST OF IRELAND THE LAND IS GENERALLY POOR. FARMING and survival have always been difficult and people have had to work hard for a living. In winter the weather shows little mercy. The endless rain tends to darken the spirit. Yet mysteriously there is an ancient conversation between the ocean and the stone on this coastline which is mirrored in the complexity of twilight. There is great beauty in how the light takes its leave of the day. From the first blush of dawn, the day is carried everywhere by the light. Time unfolds in light. In the morning, light clears all the outside darkness and the shape of each thing emerges in the brightened emptiness. Light identifies itself completely with the voyage of a day; its transparency puts the day out in the open. There is nowhere for a day to hide; it is exposed every minute to the revelations of light. Perhaps this is why twilight appears gracious; when light abandons the day, it does not believe that it will ever return and consequently permits itself an extravagant valediction in a huge ritual of colour. The silence of twilight is striking because the flourish of the colouring has the grandeur of music.
As absolute servant, light conceals itself inside its own transparency. Yet confronted at evening by the finality of darkness, it turns on every last lamp of colour. It proclaims the eternity of each tree, stone, wave and countenance which it had accompanied during the day. At twilight the light succumbs to wonder and reveals the inner colour with which daylight had vested each object. Before the day is lost, twilight applies this huge poultice to draw out all the passion of colour. Then, all the colours finally gather into a red host which the incoming darkness receives. The heart of darkness can be neither cold nor blind, infused as it is with such lived radiance. Indeed, this is also the rhythm of that threshold at the heart of human interiority. The light of our thought is always excavating our rich inheritance of darkness. The cradle of origin whose mysteries arise with the dawn, darkness is also the secret homeland where the slow harvestings of twilight return to become woven into the subtle eternity of memory:
The messenger comes from that distant place
Beside us where we cannot remember
How unlikely it is that we are here
Keepers of interiors not our own
Strangers in whom dawn and twilight are one.
Twilight is a fascinating threshold for it is then that light finally falls away and the dark closes its grip on the world. This is a frontier of tension; it is at once beginning and end, origin and completion. Here is where two opposing forces reach towards each other to create a vital frontier filled with danger and possibility.
T
HE
S
OUL AS
T
WILIGHT
T
HRESHOLD
The beautiful can exist at the edge precisely
because it has nothing to lose and everything to give away.
FREDERICK TURNER
OUR TIME IS HUNGRY IN SPIRIT. IN SOME UNNOTICED WAY WE HAVE managed to inflict severe surgery on ourselves. We have separated soul from experience, become utterly taken up with the outside world and allowed the interior life to shrink. Like a stream that disappears underground, there remains on the surface only the slightest trickle. When we devote no time to the inner life, we lose the habit of soul. We become accustomed to keeping things at surface level. The deeper questions about who we are and what we are here for visit us less and less. If we allow time for soul, we will come to sense its dark and luminous depth. If we fail to acquaint ourselves with soul, we will remain strangers in our own lives.