Born in the summer, I love the light, the warmth, the long days. I love easy, loose, light, cotton summer clothes, and going barefoot in the grass, sandals in the summer dust.
Winter has felt increasingly ominous and difficult to deal with until I discovered the secret of living light.
In a world of electric light, the darkness falls around four in the afternoon these winter days. When we lived further north up in York, I remember the deepest time of the year would see dusk by half past one.
But when I am alone in the house I don’t always switch on the electric light, and then I enjoy noticing the different light in different rooms, depending which way the windows face. I enjoy the half-light and silver light, the shy colours of the dawn, the occasional days of glorious brilliance and the moody times of purple storm cloud.
If I can have a fire in the woodstove or on the hearth (in the other room), and light the house with candles, the living light radiates vitality, as the burning wood and beeswax release the stored sunshine they contain.
The quality of each living light is unique, too – candlelight and firelight are so different from each other . . . from starlight . . . from the clear pure light of the moon . . . from the ethereal beauty of the dawn.
Living light is so beautiful.
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365 Day 4 (if you don't know what I'm talking about, see here)
I can’t remember where this came from. I acquired it when we lived in Aylesbury and I was trying to make the best of living far from my family under somewhat nightmarish circumstances. It represented my determination to assert the cheerfulness and love of my (then) new marriage to the Badger. I knocked a tack into a door to hang it on, our first Christmas there.
It’s a pretty little ornament but the memories it recalls are difficult. Just married – should have been bliss, shouldn’t it? Life ambushes us sometimes. Anyway, I loved the Badger very much, and I love him and appreciate him more the longer and better I know him. The real heart of love I will keep; the ornament can go. It’s outlived its usefulness.