The are mornings where the sky turns orange and then pink and the ocean becomes so still it appears that it is the stable force and the sky is the tumultuous one. On these mornings, I am drawn like a sleepwalker, only awake, out the door and into the ocean. I stop for shoes. Rocks and oysters and barnacles will wake a person up from their dream life faster than coffee and far uglier.
In the summer, the light shines through my window just after 5 a.m. I have watched it now for nearly two years as it does it’s wild swing from winter solstice—where it comes up over the ridge at the far south of our land—to the summer solstice where it rises over the distant hills and pours forth into the ocean. I am obsessed with the light these days. In the summer, at this latitude, we never really have black-out night, just this deep blue twilight. The daylight lasts over 16 hours. It is relentless and endless. It drives us to work hard, swim, stay up all night. Nobody can sleep without herbs or melatonin. But with so much light, who needs to sleep?
Seek the truly practical life, but seek it in such a way that it does not blind you to the spirit working in it. Seek the spirit, but seek it not out of spiritual greed, but so that you may apply it in the genuinely practical life.
–Rudolf Steiner
Then there is the winter where we have only 8 or so hours of daylight and the sun is never really overhead but stretches it’s long fingers to make eerie shadows. On these days I rise in the dark and cold and my daughter and I watch the sun rise as we walk the kilometre down (and up and up and down) the dirt road to meet her school bus. With so much dark, I wonder why we humans insist on school and work deadlines and waking. Why have we forsaken what the trees and animals al
l seem to know: hibernation is good for the soul. Plus it would save on firewood and food and all the sweeping and dishes that go with it.
In my new life I want to know the names for things. Starting with the sun and the moon and the things they govern: seasons, tides, the way I feel as I walk my daughter to the school bus. What is that tree? What is this berry? Why are those rocks pink and these grey? What is this place? Who are these people? What are their stories? Who am I? What is my story?