Photo by Ruby Doan on Unsplash
Now it’s feeling like spring, despite the worst weather all winter.
Years in Ireland last around 15 months, from January of one year to March of the next, such is the length of the winter. Spring is rarely counted, unless you’re into the league or the lambing, and it’s probably still the bloody winter anyway. Only summer matters, or September; it used to be the third week but it was inevitable the GAA would officially move the end of summer to the first weekend of September since they expanded Electric Picnic.
The grand stretch has gone beyond 6 and now it feels like spring, I’ll mark that in the calendar and remember it from here on as the official cause of it.
There’s something in the light between summer and winter, and autumn, I only noticed this year. Maybe it’s cos I was away or maybe it’s cos I’m older now or maybe I’ve only just woken up and started to pay attention to the world around me.
Sure they’re all the same thing.
The light an hour before dark in winter is the different to the light an hour before dark in the summer. It’s like someone switched it on, or even just opened the blinds.
I was chatting to a Chilean fella there last weekend, he said he’d been in Ireland a few months and was enjoying it well enough. I asked him how long he would stay, he replied: “until June or July – I want to see these long days people talk about”.
Beautiful.
And talk about it we should.
It’s grand.
He asked if he could surf in Ireland, I said I couldn’t take him but he should head west. But go jump into the Irish Sea at Dun Laoghaire tomorrow to practice getting in the cold water, ‘cos otherwise he’d be in bits.
The new light that’s revealed between 5:30 and 6 isn’t the same as January’s light, just shifted back an hour – it’s a different light uncovered, shining from a different angle. The world changes with the angle of the sun. Commuter-pace striding the length of Dublin’s Kevin Street from Fallon’s I cross Bride Street, and as I look south down the ample length of its New counterpart I’m reminded of a snapshot of great beauty I haven’t seen in months, such that I stop in the middle of the road for a moment before getting back to the work of getting to work.
Stop and have a look there the next time there’s an hour of light left on a sunny day. You can see all the way to the mountains, but the buildings create a lovely flank too. And the street has the strange property of having beautiful light.
I remember just now stopping as I crossed at the same spot last September, when it was still summer, and realising that witnessing and fully attending to and appreciating a scene of great beauty is a way of seeing into the future at that moment in time. As you pause for thought, a thought lands and rests on your attention:
“What will these look like to me in three months, a year, or five years?”
You can crystallise them if you pay attention at the moment.
I can still see it now, it has an almost watercolour quality to it.
I can’t give you an exact time to go and look for that light as it changes with the days and the seasons, the right hours to look are different, mostly extending or declining but sometimes going in reverse, disappearing in winter, covered up again.
Stop and have a look – a proper look – and then see if you remember it in three months, a year, or five years.
Just hurry up or it’ll be gone.
And don’t get hit by a car when you stop, they don’t wait around either.