This is a beautiful blog post by westcoastwoman—the photo, quote, and six-sentence description. She intimately makes the universal personal. Click here to see the many responses to it, including mine. Having spent some time on the west coast of Canada I appreciate how she captured the magic in words. The experience cannot be pinned down. It’s transcendent—”in-between-time” and “neither here nor there.” The deep silence of nature’s transitions between night and day, twilight and predawn, are like a metaphor for our own inner experiences—the gaps between waking, dreaming and sleeping, and the silent unbounded backdrop to them, our own transcendental Self.
June 12, 2019
“Everyday a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls. And then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light.”
Henry David Thoreau
Afterglow
Every night they come, the watchers of the sun-set, drawn down by the need to see the light extinguish behind the islands and the sea.
I want to share with them as they slowly rise and disperse that the setting of the sun is only a prelude to the experience they had been called to witness, but I stay silent.
It is this time between the setting sun and rising moon, this short extension of the day, this in-between-time when my heart and mind settle for just a moment.
I watch as the sky paints itself with each night’s original palette, wanting only to share with those who can look out from the same place and feel the colours as they appear, understand the need for silence.
In these moments when I am neither here nor there, anything is possible, magic is afoot and I am caught in the afterglow of another original creation as it slowly fades from sight.
The darkness takes the light, the starlings swoop once more in perfect unison over the water, I share with all who stand watching… being neither here nor there, a silent good night.
©westcoastwoman 2019
Written in response to GirlieontheEdge’s Six Sentence Story Word Prompt. Prompt word: Extension.
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This reminds me of a poem I wrote down while waking from a dream in a foreign land. It was during the predawn, when “the moon bows / before the rising sun.” See: Indonesian Mystery Poem honoring Nyi Roro Kidul.
On August 30, 2019 she posted Shadow and Light, a powerful poem inspired by a stunning photograph. I posted it as A powerful message in a Shadow and Light poem.
Tags: in-between-time, magic hour, neither here nor there, sunset, the gap, transcendent, twilight time
The Uncarved Blog 
August 31, 2019 at 4:57 pm |
[…] is another beautiful blog post by westcoastwoman. I had liked and posted an earlier one, Afterglow. She said this photo became the muse for the poem. It was a happy accident. In our discussion she […]
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