Prints - The Night Series

Night is beautiful to me. The Indian poet & philosopher Tagore said, "The evening sky to me is like a window, and a lighted lamp, and a waiting behind it." Sometimes night is like a river that carries us and sometimes night is like a mountain that hugs the ground. Sometimes night becomes water, and our beds are boats carrying across oceans of night.

For thousands of years people and animals have lived with the presence of daily darkness. Romance, stargazing, moon bathing, insomnia, heartache and dream take us into night's domain. Even with all our recent ability to electrify the darkness, night is immense. Is it our fear of the unknown that drives us to diminish the mystery? According to Navajo, the laws written in the stars carry sacred teachings. Astronomy becomes a holy profession.

Night has always been the poet's training ground. Just as colors are different at night, and the rose glows in the moonlight, poems also sound different said at night. Japanese poets went out walking at the moonrise and recorded their perceptions. According to Chet Raymo, in ancient Ireland young poets attending the bardic schools were assigned a theme in the evening, staying up a night and a day in windowless cells, composing careful rhymes in total darkness until "the following evening at the appointed time when a light was brought and the poem was written down."

The return from night is as powerful as the journey toward it. The light at dawn, like the light at sunset shimmers. As the darkness fades, the colors emerge and they bleed and fade and wash out into each other, and the sky is light before it is blue.

Dawn is beautiful to me.

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