The Perfect Light
There are times when taking a photograph that it seems the perfect light was shining. Not that the photograph captured that perfect light, but the photograph captured that moment in which the light had that perfect quality of illuminating the beauty of creation, of capturing it just so. I remember a few such moments of perfect light …
After a quite soul bending experience of uprooting myself and moving to the Saugeen Peninsula, after a summer in which I put more miles on South Western Ontario than anybody should in a vehicle, after a rectory was 80% unpacked, a long-awaited mom-visit was over, after a first Anglican clergy conference which helped me to understand how I fit with the various networks, new, old and in-between functioning in my life - Thanksgiving Weekend arrived and I was thoroughly exhausted.
Not just muscle-and-bone weary, but heart-and-soul weary. The colours of the Peninsula and the entire Niagara Escarpment area, as I drove to and from Mount Carmel amidst a most stunning display of nature’s dying off - showing us that death is anything but dark … death is it’s own blazing glory … these colours put scoops of delicious ice cream in the cones of my eyes …
The escarpment itself on the Peninsula that Thanksgiving Weekend was sandwiched by fall colours above and below the visible escarpment rock faces … the grandmothers and grandfathers of old. Early in the morning, as I got ready for church, there was a very light fog that wrapped everything in sacred softness, allowing the colours to emerge only when one was close enough to feel them moreso than just see them … to feel their life and their richness, that moth could destroy - or some other organism, but which promised to return with time in due season.
I hiked at Skinner’s Bluff that day and through an area called Skinner’s Woods. This is one of my favourite hikes on the Peninsula. I remember hiking it in the summer of 2013 when I was a summer worker at Sauble Falls Lutheran Chapel. I remember hearing loon calls carrying across the lake that summer … like the voice of the soul of creation itself calling me home.
Sunset at Skinner’s Bluff brought this perfect light, that seemed to scoop the goodness from under the trees and throw the light up to me on the escarpment’s ridge. Like a modern footprint echoing the work of an ancient raging of melting glaciers that had carved out these formations of land - Creator’s handiwork, Creator’s medicine, salve for a weary soul.
This place makes my soul feel safe because it obliterates any vestigial colonial social familial doctrinal messages that I am anything but enough. This place of perfect light captures the most beautiful reality that violence of raging water on rock creates medicine and beauty and is indeed Creator’s handiwork itself - a handiwork in which we each belong.