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| November 1. Dawning |
These days almost refuse to go unseen. The pink gold of dawning light penetrates through where just-fallen leaves so recently shaded, through where clouds covered seconds before, revealing how the color spectrum’s right now breaking open…all this almost as with a Halloween spell and/or with the holy demand that must not be denied. See! Look through the worlds. Know like a prayer that crosses the materialistic blinders and receives admission into the eternals of truth, beauty, love…
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| November 1 pathway of early light |
So many of my favorite writers are sharing this time of light breaking through. From Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations:
What some call “liminal space” or threshold space (in Latin, limen means a threshold) is a very good phrase for those special times, events, and places that open us up to the sacred. It seems we need special (sacred) days to open us up to all days being special and sacred. This has always been the case and didn’t originate with Christianity. Ancient initiation rites were intensely sacred time and space that sent the initiate into a newly discovered sacred universe. What became All Saints Day and All Souls Day (November 1–2) was already called “thin times” by the ancient Celts (as were February 1–2: St. Bridget’s Day and Candlemas Day, when candles were blessed and lit). The veil between this world and the next world was considered most “thin” and easily traversed during these times. On these days, we are invited to be aware of deep time—that is, past, present, and future time gathered into one especially holy moment.
November 1 Dawn
Of course, for those who learn to see, liminal time is the eternal now, Rumi’s “breeze at dawn,” telling secrets. As suggested in the top photo, my favorite space for contemplating this comes in the woodlands. Krista Tippett links these liminal days with forest time:
Suzanne [Simard] trained my vision and imagination down to the ground, where features of the natural world that we’re only now taking seriously are stitching the life of the forest and the life of the planet together: mycelia, fungi, mosses. It turns out that a forest is a single organism wired for reciprocity and mutuality. The oldest hub trees — which she calls Mother Trees — are incessantly sensing “who is rich and who is poor, who is healthy and who is sick.” They communicate, send warning signals, and deliver nutrients — you can hear this with a Geiger counter — by way of carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and water and chemicals and hormones. One of Suzanne’s most astonishing findings is that these networks of communication and sustenance closely mirror what we’re now able to see in the neural networks of the human brain.
I’m letting all of this enliven my understanding of what it means to stay grounded and vital and whole in this time. For this too is the generative story of our time: We’re on dazzling, revolutionary territory of seeing the workings of vitality inside the body of the Earth and inside ourselves.
Today, November 1st, “The Morning” (shared from The New York Times) features Melissa Kirsch on “Quality Time” reminding us that we’re only one more twilight from the end of Daylight Savings Time:
The hour between dog and wolf, or “l’heure entre chien et loup,” if you prefer, is, I think you’ll agree, the dreamiest way to refer to twilight. (I will entertain arguments for “the gloaming” and “the violet hour,” but I don’t suspect litigants will get very far.) It’s that time just after sunset when the atmosphere is still partly illuminated by the sun, when the light is ambiguous and the sky can’t choose between blue and black. Night hasn’t yet fully fallen and we are in the borderland between day and dark. One might be forgiven, in this threshold moment, for mistaking a dog for a wolf, for mistaking safety for danger, for feeling slightly off.
Daylight saving time ends tomorrow. That first Sunday in November is a full day suspended between dog and wolf. We’re still grasping at the corn-silk tendrils of summer just as winter gets more insistent.
October 31 sunset across the cornfield
