All alone with the Midnight Sky
I have always been pretty nocturnal — literally the exact opposite of everybody else in my family.
When I was a little girl, I loved staying up late at night in my room reading and thinking. Then when all the lights in the house were all out, I would look out my window into the silvery night Into our big, big back yard. We lived in a rural area and we had a lot of trees and open fields around us.
In the moonlit nights, I could see all these other little nocturnal critters running around the lawn — opossum, wood chucks, raccoons — and all the leaves on the trees all lit up in silver from the moonlight shining on them. When the trees softly moved in the summer breezes, it was like seeing a wave of silver moving in the backyard. It all felt very, very familiar to me — and very comforting. I knew I was the only one awake in the entire house and it was wonderfully quiet and still. There was something so calm about it. I loved it.
This watercolor pencil / colored pencil “cellular environment” is about the midnight sky and all the comfort it brings to so many nocturnal people and to all the lunar-loving people, too. I have this crazy habit that if I wake up in the middle of the night, I don’t just roll over and try to fall back asleep. Instead I get up and walk around my entire house and look out every window — first to check that all is well around my house and then second to look at the nightsky, to find the moon, to see the nocturnal colors. Sometimes I do this a couple of times a night. I love to look at that sky — black and blue and sometimes gray and purple — dotted with twinkling stars and planets — and a bright white shiny moon.
It reminds me of how my parents are these mighty stars up there now, and that each one of us, you know, the stars are a part of us too, so we are walking around with molecules from heaven from that Midnight Sky within us. So this little visual expression of mine is about all that, too.
I think about how this time of year, especially, is so good for restoring ourselves, by hibernating, slowing down, taking our time. It’s a time to retreat for awhile but then to not overstay there too long and instead to draw ourselves out of the darkness of these short-short cold-cold days and put ourselves back into the light — once restored and “re-set” we can shine not just in that light but also shine our own light into the world.
I don’t normally paint or draw in these colors, but all of a sudden one evening I just felt it, I was thinking about how the light that is up there in that Midnight Sky is also the same light that inhabits my body, my cells, my molecules, and my heart.
