Or Perhaps It's The Lake

The lake at evening. Summer. Late and north of the 45th parallel. Still a little light left this far north. The water quiet. As far as one knows. The water quiet for its full extent, say 20 miles by two. Forty square miles of quiet. And the light.

The light is something never seen before. The light upon the water. The water strangely gray and liquid. Oddly colored by the just down sun and sky transitioning to a sparsely spangled black. In the water a kind of gray purple and gray yellow and gray orange and gray red. All of it heavily gray and turning grayer. All of it mixing and merging. All of it focusing down to the northwest portion of the lake, where the sun went behind the trees some time ago.

But the surface. The surface is like a liquid mirror. A mirror in which the glass has been oddly turned to liquid. Like in a dream. And the colors there are the colors of the sky as it transitions from its last memory of day to dark.

And so the lake is in a sense the sky. Its earthly reflection. The colors made in it duplicated here below, in the mirror of the water.

There are small water sounds as the liquid of the mirror comes up against its stony frame. Its rocky irregular frame.

And there is no wind. Oh. No wind. No wind. And it is quiet for miles and miles. There is an occasional bird. An occasional unidentifiable bird. Singing in the small woodlot here.

And there are the shapes of trees becoming less and less distinct. Less and less defined. Like so many words turning in the mouth of the geophysical metaphysical world to something more and more like a series of sounds only. Sounds disconnecting from their meanings.

And so. This seems very odd. Seems not quite like the world one thinks one knows. A world in which there is sky and earth and lake and trees and wind and sound. But these are all. Well. Changing. Disappearing now. No wind. No wind. The color of the sky. The color of the lake. The color of the trees. And their distinctive shapes. Their defining leaves. All of it going now. All of it fading now to black.

Turning from the noisiness and the brightness of day to this. To this diamond dark and the quiet the dark keeps like a secret thing wrapped in the bundle of its darkness. Rolled into the center of its hiddeness.

And this feels. Oh. This feels like something is happening here. Something mysterious is occurring here. And one doesn’t know quite what. One can’t quite get one’s mind to fully understand this.

Where is God, one wonders. Where are you God in this. Then there is an answer in the extraordinary subtle—this never-before-seen—careful light upon the lake and the gentle liquid sounds and the song the bird begins to make and stops, as if it had thought better of its portion of the answer. There is an answer back in the quiet deepening in the darkening trees and the small water sounds reflected there. There is an answer back in the stars that have begun to brighten here as the world. The lovely daytime geophysical metaphysical world. In which one does the lion’s share of one’s living business. Is replaced. Is regrettably and fortunately replaced.

By this other world. This other more ascetic. This more monochrome. This world of less. In some outward senses. This world that requires great quiet in oneself to hear the little that may seem to be offered. This world that offers little help in seeing what it may suggest for our reflection. This world that requires much and perhaps contains as much as it requires. This largely contemplative world. In which the action shifts its locus. And place turns largely on itself. Curls into itself. Leaving us mostly placeless. Here. In an abstract wood beside a dream lake. Lost beneath the star-scattered black-domed infinite that is only now fully revealed and that descends. Descends farther and further down. All around us as we sit here in the almost dark. A white-star-lighted dark that seems to come from the end of time and touch and gentle. Well. Everything.