Putting out the lights

When I'm the only one home and I'm busy at my end of the table working on things - you know, absorbed in one thing or another, occasionally getting up to grab something to eat or drink, but otherwise thinking about what I'm doing - I notice the evening light. Which I love. It's summer, or just about anyway. The sun hangs in the west - a most warm orange glow. With all of the windows in our place the sun fills it up and there's no need for electric lights. As the evening moves along and I work there are distinct moments in the movement of time. The light near dusk goes purple-blue to the south and blue-grey to the east, but I only notice it when I look up from the work, that the house is dimming. Now, the mood shifting into night, the question - the dilemma - is, which electric lights will serve, and not ruin the slow stall of nature. To be sure I could ignore the question and keep working until I can no longer see, and then the question would be moot. But I like transitions. I like the shifts. I want to participate in them. Watching the day turning to night, the earth and its firmament exhaling the last breath of it, I want to meet it with that new light. That human prayer that the light live on for a few moments more. That flipping of the switch - current crackling through wire veins - glass lungs incandescent. How should we be mindful of these moments? When we do more than participate. When we take over. When we add to what has been given. When we, our appetite for waking life (and fear of sleeping death) ruling us, ignore dusk, by extending it (and then also, often, absent ourselves from the gift of dawn as well). So it is that what we have made with our hands, will in some way also make and unmake our minds. So it is that we make the earth our own. A settled place where we ignore the gentle insistence of sunset and sunrise and in their place, turn on our lights.

Ride report
in:          8'C wind 25 ks NW
out:     15'C wind 20 ks NE