I spend a lot of time awake when it’s dark out. I try to limit the number of lights on, both for the environment and not to wake family members who sleep on a more normal timetable. But this schedule makes me reflect a lot about light. For example, the other day I glanced at a mirror that happened to be reflecting a light. By reflecting light you create more light. Think of the moon. A full moon on a clear night can make a massive difference in how well you can see. Farmers used to know this as harvest moons gave the possibilities for longer light-time hours to get seasonal work done. And that light reflecting in my eye in an early morning mirror made me wonder what would happen if you set up a mirror facing a mirror with a light in the middle. Wouldn’t you have just created more light in the world?
I’m almost always awake before sunrise. I don’t recollect the last time I awoke to find the sun in the sky. There are so many subtleties to morning light. You can see it coming a long way off. I try to jog at first light, when it’s just light enough to see where I’m going. It’s important to seek light in the dark. There’s a kind of spirituality to it. Often when I’m jogging I’m amazed at how far even a small light carries. When I see the stars at night and think how terribly, terribly far away they are, I marvel that their light still reaches us. Light can be blocked out, but unless it is, it stops at nothing. Light persists.
Bioluminescence fascinates me. We now know that our very genes have the ability to create their own light. Fireflies and deep-sea creatures have figured out how to do it, and, I suspect, scientists could engineer a glowing person. We have it within ourselves to create our own light. Science wouldn’t disagree. Sometimes such things are best seen by walking around in the dark. The contrast helps that inner light show through more clearly. Those who are afraid of the dark haven’t spent the time to truly become acquainted with it. The dark is a very capable teacher and the rhetoric that it’s evil is based on mistaking, as the Buddha said, the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. But it’s starting to get light out—time for me to go for a jog to seek even more of it in the semi-dark.
