Time to decide: Dog or wolf?

By JoAnne Young

I have been thinking a lot over the past two years about dusk, that time of day when the sun sets but the darkness has not yet fully descended. 

 

The French have a soul-gripping phrase for it: “Entre chien et loup,” the time between dog and wolf, when the two can’t be distinguished from each other. 

 

Are we looking into the distance at friend or foe? The known or the unknown? Hope or fear? 

 

It’s a time when the darkness gathers its forces, when our shadows move into our very beings. The hour of metamorphoses when we go into waiting for the sun to finish its rounds lighting  the rest of the world and then return to us, bringing back hope and luminance. 

 

I used to think of dusk as a poetic time, a time of settling calm, of transition or transformation. 

 

But when I recently set out to photograph dusk on several evenings, I found it was more chilling than calming, more discordant than poetic. More confounding than serene. 

 

It’s something like the turbulence of adolescence, that age between the innocence of childhood and the reckoning of the adult world. 

 

And it’s a lot like what we have been living through the past two years, a time we couldn’t know what or who we could trust. Only worse. Because dusk has a definite beginning and end. The sun goes down, the light fades, the night descends and shows itself. This era of pandemic and politics seems a never-ending cycle.

 

As I am writing this, I am asking what I choose to see as I squint into the twilight of the early 2020s. More years of the darkness that seems to surround us now? Or is that light, just a few hours, days, months ahead?

 

At this moment, I don’t know. I’m hoping to discover a clear direction by the end of these paragraphs. 

 

Amy Leach, in “Things That Are,” writes that most plants will bend over backwards to cooperate with reality. They will bend and warp toward the light. 

 

Birds make long arduous flights to find the warmth, then make their way back again as the cold departs in their homeland. Or they stay put, and wait out periods of difficulty, knowing the spring and summer will return.

 

The daffodils and tulips and tree buds don’t sit in the ground, complaining about the lingering cold. They show up in all their brightness, in spite of the risks of a mid-April snow. 

 

Now that I think about it, I instinctively ditched the idea of taking photos of the dusk. I turned my camera toward an abundance of pelicans bobbing and flying at Pawnee Lake near Lincoln, despite the wind gusts and 40-degree temps. 

I have welcomed the goldfinches to the feeder outside my front window. 

 

I have planted pansies and watched the clematis I thought had fallen prey to the frozen and dry winter grow leaves of green. And I leave the hope open that any day now I can trust the weather enough to plant more grass and blooming plants. 

 

They have survived. They have decided on dog, friend, hope and the known. 

 

Rainer Maria Rilke says it this way: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going.”

 

I have to think, maybe I can see the light out there somewhere, too.