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 that right now is a moment 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 they feel a strange kind of sorrow. A friend of mine once remarked on this during a drive in the country. A confirmed urban city guy, he said, what do people do out here. At the time I thought they’re probably inside making dinner, or any number of evening activities. But I knew what he meant. It’s a liminal time, and it’s a liminal light. Civil, nautical, astronomical twilight. And the birds, they were chatty about it.
As I contemplate this light this particular evening, maybe because the time had recently changed, and so now the light had shifted in my usual day schedule, and so this almost-light captured my attention, as I contemplated, I imagine someone coming into the house then. The door must have been unlocked or maybe they had a key. And maybe it’s not someone, maybe it’s you.
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 the lack of ready-made words then, and I would gesture helplessly at the window and say something kind of unsatisfactory about the light. You, or they, would be like:
the what?
But I think 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 you/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 just as quickly as you/they moved on to their own thing whatever that would be. And the spell I was under would be broken, but the remements of mood would remain.
And how could I tell them, or maybe you, there was something really special about the outside light right now – can’t you see? Couldn’t you tell?
You see it every day. What are you talking about? Every day. Nothing special. Regular day. I’m sure you must have heard the birds on some level, but your brain rendered the sound as non-essential, no reward or threat there, you do not have to pay attention to that.
the birds? What birds?
The light. That intense close blueness, that …
What IS that about the light at that time of day, the almost-dark, but not quite dark, but the presence of it dark? It’s liminal light because you don’t stay out in it. You turn on the lights. You dash it away. The artificial lights blinds you to it instantly.
I am in the magic of the almost-dark.
I’ve experienced that liminal light as the light of ten year old summer children. When we 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 we were ten, and we were out in the almost-dark, and shadows were deeper, and everything became colourless, and monochrome blue. And exciting.
As a child we felt on the edge of something, and our friends laughed just a little bit harder, and there was just a bit more frenetic energy about us all, and we knew it was just a matter of time before the adults caught on that we were out in the dark. and spoiled our fun. But us, we see, and we were safe, and as children feel, we felt we had an unnamed, unidentified superpower that allowed us to see what the adults could not in the now secret world that belonged only to us, 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? Light that maybe you, or they once intimately knew, but was buried in the recess of your, or their, mind.
How could I describe how I was watching the silhouette of birds fly low in the neighbours back yard and listening to the birds.
I was listening. I was thinking about how in the summer, and I saw those dark shapes dash around in the sky that 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, present, one with it.
The birds were excited.
It was almost-dark time.
But it was not summer. 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, you might ask, what do they know about clocks? Or that it’s changed? That an hour, (what’s that), just went somewhere?
But at least twice a year things shift for those in the wild. They must know something is different. One day patterns in 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 the same, 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 if you catch what I mean. Their perception of time must be based on that yard stick. That means that it’s only a few times in their lifetime that these things shift. Mysterious events. And I think about this, because I am captured by mysterious events. Because I like how magic is all around us if only you think about it differently.
If you, as a robin, for example, are living say, just two or three 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 shifting thing must seem so arbitrary. And so synced. Like – all the humans, all of them, they all shifted. Do they wonder how we are all so coordinated in our chaos?
Why now, why today, the robins 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 gap in your mouth where a tooth once was, a tooth you took for granted, didn’t feel, and never once thought about beyond you daily brushings and trips to the dentist, now takes up room in your mind with it’s absence.
This feeling that turns over, like when you lift a rock to see what’s underneath, like maybe when the hairs on your arms rise up or on the back of your neck, whatever it is for you, this transition. This feeling that maybe isn’t so sudden, but maybe 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. A liminal 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 doing what appears to be nbothing in the dark. What are they doing.
Or maybe for them it’s more like, in animal form, of course, 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 I like to think about the freedom of it at first.
I like to think of them unbound, but mapped out by the borders that shape out our lives, our driveways, our sidewalks, and lawns we 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 artificial 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 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? How would that change how we think, the way our thoughts are shaped, the drifts of our dreams.
But when it comes to the wildlife, freedom inevitably evolves in reality, for I am never that far away from the dark. I don’t like to think of a life foraging in the winter. Then the freedom doesn’t seem free at all. No, 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. For I tap into those moments of a trapped experience, trapped by pain, trapped by circumstance, where time crawls its slowest, when you think you cannot bear it a moment longer, and yet you must, you have to, you do.
It was swans that impressed upon me the most how miserable it must be to tolerate the bite and gnashing of the Canadian winter and you have no other choice but to tolerate it. Swans live a long time compared to a robin, somewhere like 15-20 years in the wild. That’s a lot of winters. Long winters.
I felt the misery deeply for no other reason of the sheer irritability of one swan, and the biting cold of the time I observed it. Everything about this swan said unhappy. 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 at this time of day/night, the time of almost dark where everything was so blue and close. Honking and calling, the birds came skidding down from the sky into the water from wherever they scattered to during the day. The birds would collect together in the water over the period of a maybe 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 much chance to eat. I remember that foot, and the slight phantom physical pain it would give me. I tossed the food into the mass, but then as quick as I could, tossed another handful farther and farther away from the hoard in the direction of the lame thing, hoping to give it a fighting chance for this night. Don’t mess with nature, but there we were, messing.
There would be two, maybe three swans in the large bird group that consisted mostly of mostly ducks and Canadian geese. I found it interesting they huddled together. We sat there with our canned drinks in the car sipping with the sun dipping even lower and lower beneath the edge of earth minute by 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 and life.
The aggravated swan took a dislike to one of the mallard mandrake ducks huddling nearby, and took to snatching at its chest feathers, plucking them out. I imagined that was a sensitive spot on a duck for a plucking, particularly in the freezing cold. 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, until the swan in all its impatient irritation, went for it again, darting its head forward, to pluck out more chest feathers of the poor duck. The duck didn’t learn. It appeared to be doomed to repeat the cycle, back up, creep close, there was some kind of dysfunction there.
It wasn’t that the swan hated the ducks. It just hated this particular duck. I thought about that too.
They all looked the same to me, but I did not have the sensitivities or sensibilities of a swan. What was so offensive about this particular duck? Because other ducks were positoned even closer to the swan. All ignored. Was it the way the particular duck 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, the 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, enraged. They’re all out there trying to survive. It’s not just, turn up the heat, add another blanket. I think about how that cold that Lake Ontario water must have been, and yet still must be warmer than the air because it was not yet frozen. That’s the warmth you were pursuing. And once that water was frozen you would climb onto the snow, tucking your feet im, enduring because it wasn’t killing you off yet, because that is all there was, huddle up, and wait until the slightly 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 to have. 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 almost-dark, and the silhouette of birds swooping around, and the new spring sound of excited birds, but excited maybe because the time just changed. Excited maybe for spring. Maybe for life.
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 a person might first get to know me, but that maybe become perplexing and vexing, maybe if you had to live with me. Because what seemed kind of interesting then, seems like work to listen to, work to think about now. That person probably have other things to think about. Practical things. Things that need doing. I understand. I know who you are.
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 blither-blather about the light. And yes of course, there are things I should be doing, too and I bet that could annoy some people because what about my priorities, here? But I lack the words to describe the importance of it, and why this is a priority and why the this and that that needs to be done are just the mechanical trappings of what we think life is, it’s not real life. The knowledge driving this are stuffed down so hard that the words become mashed together for a reason. And even if I could fluff them back up into words and put space into them for you, and even if I could articulate them in such a way you’d feel it and understand, you probably have things to do, and this is your life.
I will likely have a reaction then. A stuffing back down, maybe, depends on who you turn out to be. But more I might react with an unmet need to wake you up. I know we must walk around in our sleep-walk life. Things do need doing. I know we must be switched off for so much of it, know that more than you might expect. I know we cannot be turned on all the time. I cannot live in the raw state all the time.
But do not let it slip away, I want to say to you. This life. This magic. This miracle of living. Be present to it. Feel it. 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. You will wish you turned on sooner. I feel the ache for those that feel it too late. I feel it.
But the person that walked in, might not have been you, or might not have been someone, just anyone. Maybe the person would have been M. I imagine that if M wondered what I was doing, it would have been like, what are you doing, but in a conspiratorial way, like I might have a secret to share, like something exciting might be going on, exciting like the raccoons were up to something fascinating, something baffling like the earth just shook, or there was something in the middle of something about something – what is it? Tell me, M might say.
These light thoughts, these bird thoughts, these in between thoughts, these almost-dark thoughts are the kind of thoughts I would share with M. who would probably riff with me on this or that, go somewhere I hadn’t thought of, or land on something I had exactly thought of and our mutual 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 didn’t get things done. And we’re hungry, and like almost every time we are together, 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.