Anam Cara

As absolute servant, light conceals itself inside its own transparency. Yet confronted at evening by the finality of darkness, it turns on every last lamp of colour. It proclaims the eternity of each tree, stone, wave and countenance which it had accompanied during the day. At twilight the light succumbs to wonder and reveals the inner colour with which daylight had vested each object. Before the day is lost, twilight applies this huge poultice to draw out all the passion of colour. Then, all the colours finally gather into a red host which the incoming darkness receives. The heart of darkness can be neither cold nor blind, infused as it is with such lived radiance. Indeed, this is also the rhythm of that threshold at the heart of human interiority. The light of our thought is always excavating our rich inheritance of darkness. The cradle of origin whose mysteries arise with the dawn, darkness is also the secret homeland where the slow harvestings of twilight return to become woven into the subtle eternity of memory:

The messenger comes from that distant place

Beside us where we cannot remember

How unlikely it is that we are here

Keepers of interiors not our own

Strangers in whom dawn and twilight are one.

Twilight is a fascinating threshold for it is then that light finally falls away and the dark closes its grip on the world. This is a frontier of tension; it is at once beginning and end, origin and completion. Here is where two opposing forces reach towards each other to create a vital frontier filled with danger and possibility.

T

HE

S

OUL AS

T

WILIGHT

T

HRESHOLD

The beautiful can exist at the edge precisely

because it has nothing to lose and everything to give away.

FREDERICK TURNER

OUR TIME IS HUNGRY IN SPIRIT. IN SOME UNNOTICED WAY WE HAVE managed to inflict severe surgery on ourselves. We have separated soul from experience, become utterly taken up with the outside world and allowed the interior life to shrink. Like a stream that disappears underground, there remains on the surface only the slightest trickle. When we devote no time to the inner life, we lose the habit of soul. We become accustomed to keeping things at surface level. The deeper questions about who we are and what we are here for visit us less and less. If we allow time for soul, we will come to sense its dark and luminous depth. If we fail to acquaint ourselves with soul, we will remain strangers in our own lives.

When we begin to awaken to the light of soul, life takes on a new depth. The losses we have suffered, the delight and peace we have experienced, the beauty we have known, all belong together in a profound way. One of the greatest treasures in the world is a contented heart. When we befriend the twilight side of the heart, we discover a surer tranquillity where the darkness and the brightness of our lives dwell together. We gain the courage to search out where the real thresholds in life are, the vital frontiers, the parts of our life that we have not yet experienced. Beyond work, survival, relationships, even family, we become aware of our profound duty to our own life. Like the farmer in spring, we turn over a new furrow in the unlived field. We awaken our passion to live and are no longer afraid of the unknown, for even the darkest night has a core of twilight. We recover within us some of the native integrity that wild places enjoy outside. We learn to befriend our complexity and see the dance of opposition within us not as a negative or destructive thing but as an invitation to a creative adventure. The true beauty of a person glimmers like a slow twilight where the full force of each colour comes alive and yet blends with the others to create a new light. A person’s beauty is sophisticated and sacred and is far beyond image, appearance or personality.