If I allow it, this hour is when my mind releases its grip on what it believes it knows and entertains things that don’t quite fit by light of day. There is surrender in this walk, a giving over that can allow the mind to wander and dream a little as thoughts begin to play with their boundaries. Your spatial awareness is keen, your intuition guiding you around things you know only faintly. The brush of the pine needles across your arm is heard from within. The grains of sand that grind and shift underfoot are turning cobbles. The roots beneath your feet are vivid in their texture. Recall how you navigate as you walk a path in the woods as the sun sets. From where we stand on Outer Cape Cod, we see it all, how the night sweeps in from the ocean as the day retreats beyond the bay. The nose has more space at the table of the mind, making the subtle, damp smell of lichen and the straw-scent of dune grass rich and full.Īnd the edges of the body blur the world becomes more a part of us, and we become more a part of the world. The skin feels the air, its warmth or coolness, its movement. The ears gather the far-off rustling sounds we fail to note at other times. If we listen, they tell us, “I am no longer your greatest help here.” Now the body awakens. But as the light fades, the eyes must cede their seat of influence. I imagine that what happens is this: by day, our eyes dominate our sense of the world they gather and report and hold sway in our brains. At dusk our thoughts are no longer black and white but instead are glossy and almost purple, like the inside of a shell. Our awareness is broadened, as if we’ve grown a new sense. It blossoms from the core and spreads out to the edges of the skin and keeps going past our edges and into the soft, fading light. Something inside awakens to this transition.
And we are in between, witness to it all. “It’s your turn now,” says one to the other.
(Photos by Kai Potter)įrom where we stand on this outermost edge the dark mass of night sweeps in over the world from the ocean as the day withdraws over the bay, its light still mixed in the molecules of the air. On a walk in the fading light, the body awakens, hearing more, feeling its way. John Steinbeck described it as “the hour of the pearl.” For him it was a magical interlude just before dawn: “The interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.” My hour of the pearl is the long dusky moment after the sun has dipped, and it is no longer day but not yet night.
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