The Time of the Magic Light

After supper tonight Lorraine and I went for a walk. It hadn’t started to get dark yet, although the sun had set, as we walked up the hill towards York Redoubt. I noticed a couple of places next to the road where the maple leaves had started to turn red, and then I saw a small mountain ash, also known as a rowan tree, loaded with clusters of bright orange berries. In that moment the berries were glowing almost as if they were illuminated from within. I said, Look at that, and Lorraine replied, Yup, it’s the magic light time. I looked at the sky and at the light that shone from it, even without the sun showing, and then at my hands, which also seemed to be glowing with inner light and colour. It really was the magic light time, the time that Lorraine is always looking for when she wants to make a photograph, the time when everything glows.

We live in a northern clime where the time of magic light is stretched out a little by the angle of the sun as it sets, so that we have a longer twilight time than places farther south. Some people call this time the gloaming, a northern word, Germanic in origin, that is connected with that glow I was talking about. So tonight we were walking up the hill in the gloaming, and the mountain ash berries caught my eye in the gloaming. There were no photographs tonight, just the brightness of some autumn berries, but the magic light was there, and the world glowed.

In Palmyra, our oasis home in Syria, the twilight is shorter, just as the glow before sunrise is shorter, than here in Nova Scotia. But that doesn’t mean there is no magic light there. In fact, out in the desert the stillness that happens as night is falling has a magic of both light and feel. The wind usually falls away, and there is a silence out there. It is quiet and restful, and that world also glows.

A few kilometres from the town, the sun sets behind a distant ridge of hills, and the magic light time is extended a little more than if it just dropped behind a flat desert horizon. It was the perfect time for making photographs, Ghassan and Mohamed’s figures glowing as they walked away from the camera, and the silence falling all around us. Right after we finished photographing there walked a camel, followed by another, and another, until there was a long parade of camels, including a few spindly-legged babies, on the edge of a low rise with the sky glowing behind them. The world seemed to be holding its breath, with just the silent steps of the camels walking past us, silhouetted against that evening sky. The magic was not just the light, but the wonder of those camels walking through our world. (If you click on the image above, you should be able to see it bigger.)

Where are they going? Lorraine asked Ghassan.

To their home, he said.

And we saw their home, a depression of soft sand near some tents we later came to know as Atala’s, before we drove back to town in Ghassan’s truck, to wait for the next magic light time and for Lorraine’s next photograph.