No Night
The night is not the night.
Night is not defined by an absence of light. Night offers our clearest view of our place in the cosmos. It’s only at night that we truly see our surroundings.
When the sun rises, the light bounces off the earth and reflects back at us from the atmosphere, and we live our days forgetting that the darkness and the stars are still there, beyond the blue bubble.
When dawn breaks, red and gold and blue— that illusive glare blinding us to the night that is never not there — when the sky returns, we turn our attention to the here and now, to our little lives.
But at night we’re reminded that we’re just “noiseless patient spiders,” as Whitman says:
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
Night never recedes.
There is no night.
Only the vastness of space surrounding us.
