It’s the time of day that if you have the lights turned on, it looks dark outside. But! If you turn the lights off, it’s dark inside. Twilight. But then outside everything is lit with strange blue glow that makes you feel it’s this time that doesn’t belong to day or night. It’s a liminal time, a time people usually don’t pay attention to, or if they do, and if they feel it, perhaps feel a strange kind of sorrow. It’s a liminal time, and it’s a liminal light. Civil, nautical, astronomical twilight.
And I imagine someone coming home then, or maybe not home, exactly, but into the house, and maybe it’s not someone, maybe it’s you. Or maybe it’s someone.
And there I would be. Not a single light on in the house, I’m standing in the dark like a crazy person. What are you doing, you or they would ask me.
I would, most likely, be caught off guard, and I would feel the weight of my thoughts, and the weight of your question, and then I would gesture helplessly at the window and say something kind of unsatisfactory about the light and you or they would be like, the what?
But you or they would quickly realize that there was nothing very exciting about whatever it was, and would move on to whatever it was you/they were thinking about doing when they entered the house, before I was seen standing there, before you or they had their own brief flashes of wondering about what was going on, why the heck in the dark, what are you doing, that’s weird (but is it?), flashes of thoughts that would quickly vanish as you/they moved on to their own thing.
And how could I tell them or maybe you there was something really special about the outside light right now – couldn’t they tell? Couldn’t you tell? That intense close blueness, that … what IS that about the light at that time of day, the almost dark, but not quite, but the presence of it.
I’ve experienced it as the light of ten year old children in the summer, when you were out playing, and it was getting dark, but the adults were doing forgetful adult things, and maybe the streetlights hadn’t quite come on yet, but you were ten, and you were out in the almost dark, and shadows were deeper, and everything became colourless, monochrome.
As a child you felt on the edge of something, and your friends laughed just a little bit harder, and there was just a bit more frenetic energy about you all, and you knew it was just a matter of time before the adults caught on that you were out in the dark. and spoiled your fun But you see, and you were safe, and as children feel, you felt you had super power that allowed you see what the adults could not in the now secret world that belonged only to the children of the moment.
How could I tell a person who walked into my house about the magic of that liminal light that had me captured. How could I describe how I was watching the silhouette of birds fly low in the neighbours back yard and listening. I was listening. I was thinking about how in the summer, I thought they were bird in the dark, but they were bats. But this evening these were birds, and I was listening to a sound that felt like spring, to a sound that felt like the birds were just like we were as children.
The birds were excited.
It was light/dark time.
It was March, and the clocks had just changed.
And I get to thinking about that. I admit, I think about these kinds of things more than I care to admit out loud, but my mind is on the birds, on wildlife in general; what do they make of the time change?
Of course, what do they know about time? Or that it’s changed? That an hour just went somewhere?
But at least twice a year things shift. They must know something is different. One day the world shifts, one day the world wakes up earlier, goes to bed earlier. For no apparent reason. The sound of traffic, the smells, the lights, the movement of humans, the activity, all shifted.
And these animals, birds, squirrels, rodents, that only live a couple of short years, well, their whole lives must feel like the length of whole lives, of course. Their perception of time must be based on that — so that’s only a few times in their lifetime that things shift. Mysterious events. And if you are living just two years, and two years is the yard stick by which to slice a whole life into measurable moments, well, even a whole hour must be a significant amount of time. And the whole thing so arbitrary. And so synced. Like – do they wonder how we are all so coordinated in our chaos?
Why now, why today, the birds must wonder. What else is going to happen?
There is something about this feeling that I imagine the birds have that I like. I come back to these feeling states again and again the way you run your tongue over a space in your mouth where a tooth once was, something you took for granted, didn’t feel, and never thought about, now takes up room in your mind with it’s absence.
This feeling that turns over, like lifting a rock to see what’s underneath, like maybe the hairs on your arms raise up or on the back of your neck, whatever it is for you, this transition, or maybe its more like the slow dawning of a realization, that once realized, you cannot go back. It’s not necessarily a good feeling, but certainly it’s an arresting one.
Something happened. Something is happening.
I don’t want to say it out loud because I don’t want to bring certain things into being, but these are the feelings I have a fascination for. Some kind of something, some change, some shift, some upheaval to the routine, an opportunity to experience life differently, a change. A turning point.
I like to think about how superstitious animals might be about things like this. Why did the whole world suddenly change in this inexplicable way – things all seem the same, but the light is different. We feel different.
I like to think of what sense they try to make of it. What were the signs that brought this change on – the weather? The thing that happened earlier — what?? How do we predict it next time? Do they have a sense of foreboding, or is it more like, ok, that’s weird. But whatever. Like walking in on someone who is standing in their house in the dark. What are they doing. Or maybe it’s more like, am I tripping? Didn’t this all happen at a different time yesterday? No? I don’t remember. Ok, whatever.
I like to imagine what a life must be like not measured by external clocks, and tedious domestic tasks, and excruciating tax returns. In the case of birds, I like to imagine just how completely different they think and perceive simply because they live in the up and down, as well as horizontal planes. Like what does that do to a mind? I like to think of their freedom. At least at first.
And I like to think of them unbound by the borders that shape out our lives, our drive ways, our sidewalks, and lawns you don’t really walk on. I like to imagine how they perceive our backyards, not as individual enclosed rectangles of arranged space, but instead swaths of long patches of backyardness, strips of green spaces, punctuated by gridlocked fences and other random backyard things, this one with a small rectangular articial pond, and this one with – is that thing a tent? while this one still had the most social tree. What is that like? Not see a fence as a fence. What was it like to ride the slide of air slide that slips over tree and around the shed. If we could tap into that, how would we feel about these things that are so commonplace that we barely notice them?
But when it comes to the wildlife, I don’t like to think of a life foraging in the winter. Then the freedom doesn’t seem free at all. I don’t like to think of that at all for the birds and animals, even though this winter wasn’t so bad for the cold as other winters have been.
It was swans that impressed upon me the most how miserable it must be to tolerate the winter and you have no other choice but to tolerate it. Just because of the sheer irritability of one of swans – like that’s an unhappy swan. I’ve never seen an animal in the world that just seemed so… cantankerous. That’s a hard winter.
I remember watching the ducks and geese fly in from all around, honking and calling, and skidding down from the sky into the water about this time of blue day/night from wherever they were during the day. The birds seem to collect together in the water over the period of a half an hour around a boat slip at Bond Head or some such place like that somewhere on the edge of Lake Ontario, in the dead of winter.
Sometimes we would feed them, delighting in the way humans delight in making an animal respond to something we’re doing. We are still children at heart. Look at them eat. Oh, that one gets none, and try as we might, the bully birds don’t give that one with a missing foot eat much. I remember that foot, and the slight phantom physical pain it would give me. Don’t mess with nature, but there we were messing.
There would be two, maybe three swans in the large bird group made up of mostly ducks and Canadian geese. We sat there with our canned drinks in the car sipping with the sun dipping even lower and lower beneath the earth by the minute. We watched them and we drank for we too were in a liminal space of time, we were in a kind of betweening of here and there of both in time and space.
The one swan that seemed particularly aggravated took a dislike to one of the mallard mandrakes huddling nearby, and took to snatching at its chest feathers, plucking them out, or so I imagine and I imagine that was a sensitive spot for a plucking. Back the fuck up, duck.
The duck would back off, but in a short amount of time it either forgot or hoped the swan did and would adjust itself surreptitiously and in doing so slowly creep closer back, until the swan in all its irritation went for it again, darting its head forward, to pluck out more chest feathers of the poor duck. The duck didn’t learn and seemed doomed to repeat the cycle, back up, creep close, there was some kind of dysfunction there.
It wasn’t that the swan hated ducks. It just hated this particular duck. I thought about that too. What was so offensive about this particular duck? Because other ducks were closer to the swan. All ignored. Was it the way it held it’s head, flapped a wing, it’s obsequious way to attempt to get back into the good graces of the swan bully? Whatever it was swan just could not abide by it. Perhaps when not forced in to such close quarters, the swan might not have been bothered, but it in brutal harsh winter, the swan was not having it with this duck
I don’t like to think of this winter struggle, but I do. Petulant, huffy, testy. They’re all out there trying to survive. I think about how that cold water still must be warmer than the air because it was not yet frozen. And that’s the warmth you have at night. And once it was frozen you would need to climb onto the snow because that is all there was, huddle up, and wait until the dlightly warmer warmth of dawn. I thought about how as a glorious swan you must slum it out with the Canadian geese and the annoying ducks and that if you were lucky enough a drunk human or two might come by and throw down some bread and seed for those birds that were the most aggressive of them. If you were lucky enough to survive the winter.
And these are the kinds of thoughts that I think in the dark of my house, when I wander around in the magic of the dark light, and the silhouette of birds swoop around, and the new spring sound of excited birds, but excited maybe because the time just changed. These are the kind of thoughts that I might share if I am not caught off guard or if not needing to be on guard, thoughts that seem mildly amusing or quirky when you first meet me, but that become perplexing and vexing as you get to know me because what seemed kind of interesting now seems like work to have to think about. You have other things to think about. Things that need doing. I know your type.
And I can’t explain to you that while I know the day-to-day things must of course be done, that this is not just the mindless musings of birds or some made up thing about the light. I lack the words to describe the importance. Do not let this slip away, I want to say. This life. When it comes to the end you will not care about the lists and tasks. You will care about the birds. You will care about the light.
But the thought are stuffed down so hard that the words become mashed together and even if I could fluff them back up and put space into them for you, and actually be articulate about it, you have things to do. And things must be done. Even I cannot argue with that.
But neither can I impress upon you how important it seems to ask is this really how we are meant to live our lives? Is this how we are meant to think. Is how we perceive really the reality? Is this really what it means to be alive? To feel alive? Can we be awestruck, dumbstruck at this miracle of life? Because we walk around as if its all tasks to be done, and lists to be crossed off. And while you think I am dreaming, I can’t help but be certain that you are.
But they are the kind of thoughts I would share with M. who would probably riff with me on this or that, something I hadn’t thought of, or something I had exactly thought of and our bird wonderings would wind around each other and lead us to some other place, and there we would probably be in the dark together, discussing and wondering, then when an hour went by, it’s no longer twilight. And we’re hungry and we would be wondering where the time went. And damn, if there wasn’t an hour there somewhere, where did that hour go? I guess the time changed.