twilight
I was walking along the shore of Long Island capturing the setting sun in all its wonder when I caught a glimpse of a boat out at sea. My initial thought was, why is this boat out there this time of day? But then I quickly changed gears and thought, it must be fascinating to see the sun set while actually on the water. (A dream of mine, I will share one day.) Isn’t it fun to catch a glimpse of something and allow it to create a new script in your mind? Who is on the boat? Where are they going? What are they doing now? How do they navigate in the darkness? It’s fun to take a moment and create your own story. I don’t think we do this enough. We’re so stuck in our need for told stories or conversation. We have become receivers of information more so than givers of thought.
I find myself doing this quite a bit. We put on our radio and TV to be fed information. We’re searching the internet for items to purchase. How often do we allow or even encourage ourselves to create our own thoughts, ideas or even narrative?
Some of us are getting better at this through practices of meditation, yoga, creating art or even doing a puzzle. These types of task rewire our brain. I want to be more mindful of this in the New Year. I want to try to be still and quiet, which will require some discipline and perhaps more opportunities to escape and catch the twilight sky.
When I think of the word twilight I think of day merging into night and the word dawn is the opposite. However, a definition I found on google goes like this. “You can define twilight simply as the time of day between daylight and darkness, whether that's after sunset, or before sunrise. It's a time when the light from the sky appears diffused and often pinkish. The sun is below the horizon, but its rays are scattered by Earth's atmosphere to create the colors of twilight.”
Isn’t that a beautiful description of the word twilight? Twice a day we can experience twilight, not just once. I’m going to try to be more mindful of twilight and allow that time of day, whether in the a.m. or p.m., to be my grounding time. Each day the time of twilight changes a little. But setting aside time to capture the view, to experience creation, to re-set your mind is a way to clear your head and refocus on something more meaningful than a said script that we’re so bombarded with everyday.
It’s not always convenient to catch the sunrise or sunset but perhaps it can be a trigger to remind ourselves that we need a few moments of quiet reflection. So take that walk on the beach, or whatever setting gives you inspiration. View a boat out at sea and make up your own story about what they’re doing. It can be a romantic script, a drama or even a mystery plot. Let your thoughts wander and your imagination take off as you create or just dream of something attainable or unattainable. You might find it to be quite fun and it will do your head some good.
Sometimes we need to control the contents of what enters our brain. We need to feed instead of being fed.
(Last December I wrote a blog post called: missing out. It kind of dove-tails into this post. If you can, take a look at it either again, or for the first time.)
