A Month of Twilight

Into December we go, with a look back at the quiet tones of morning

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“When I woke the morning light was just slipping in front of the stars and I was covered with blossoms.”―Mary Oliver, Blue Iris: Poems and Essays

Hello and happy December. I truly hope you each had a good end of November and a peaceful week. Some of you know that through the years I have made a lot of soup, and I’ve talked a lot about soup, and I’ve talked about tracking soup. Somewhere along the way, there was even a year where I was trying to record at least one weekly soup.

I only make a few different soups. Many times when I make soup, it is exactly the same soup that I made the week before. I don’t really use recipes, so every batch of soup is somewhat new and somewhat different from the one before. Even with the limited range, we often finish the soup and declare the soup the best soup ever.

I have always loved that because we’re not always thinking that what was in the past was better. There’s something so delightful about living in the moment and thinking that the soup, the bowl of soup we just had, was great, no matter how humble and simple and basic it might have been.

It was the best soup ever is a mark of contentedness, a mark of living in the present. The truth is there have probably been better soups. There are definitely some soups I can remember associated with certain people or specific occasions that easily make the list of best soups ever. But in the moment, it’s fairly wonderful to finish eating and think, best soup ever.

I think I made the best soup ever recently, in fact, the first soup I’ve made in many, many, many months. It was so good that I made it again the next week.

But I also made the best macaroni and cheese ever last week.

I don’t even think that is an overstatement. In terms of our extensive family history with macaroni and cheese, which is more of a baked affair than a creamy affair, the macaroni and cheese I made on Thanksgiving was the best ever.

Some of you caught a note I posted about macaroni and cheese when I was thinking about what to do for Thanksgiving. I didn’t even realize until writing that note that there might have been something going on with the familiar and that there might also have been something going on with trying to make things easy on me. Ultimately, I did exactly what I said I might do and made a Franken macaroni and cheese, combining the approach I've always taken with some of what I picked up from looking at a bunch of different recipes in recent weeks.

I have to say, it was the best macaroni and cheese ever.

I’m glad I overthought things. I think it led to something new that will be the way I make macaroni and cheese moving forward. It was that good.

Today, I want to wrap up the November light project, share a little bit more about how it went, and show the final set of thumbnails.

I also want to point out that the prompt for postcard three, a wintry prompt for December, is available.

Thank you for reading and for commenting and interacting here at Illustrated Life.

I really appreciate that some of you find something motivating and relatable in my writing and value my work in this space. That’s what this is all about—helping you find footing in your own creative practice. Knowing the posts and prompts are important to you, important to your creative habit and to your week, means more than you realize. I always hope that there is a mix of inspiration and mirroring and reflection and connecting of dots and nudging and encouraging and supporting of your individual journey with your art, your memory, your aging, your parenting, your caregiving, and more. Whatever mix of those things is true for you right now, they can all be filtered through and fueled by your creative habit and your approach to creative life.

I look forward to writing and making art through December with you.

Thank you for reading.

Amy

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A Month of Twilight

In November, I got up every morning and stood in the dark kitchen and looked out the window over the roof of my next-door neighbor’s house and into the distance where I can see morning light. Every morning, I got up before sunrise and recorded the colors of the transition between night and day, documenting the interstitial space of twilight or dawn.¹ There is a brief window of time as the colors of day rise from the bottom and meet the night. It was a quiet project.

(I explained more about what I was doing, and the approach I was taking, last month. This is the first year I’ve done this project digitally, and I did use a really basic overlay so that I didn’t have to worry about redrawing the frame of the view each day.)

At Dawn

I am glad that November is over because I am tired of having to get up with the predawn light.

Tracking morning light in November was a wonderful project, and yet the struggle was real in terms of getting up. It doesn’t really seem that early, but a matter of a few minutes can make a dramatic difference between catching something interesting in the sky and it being blown out and full day already.

You don’t get a second chance each morning. If you miss it, you miss it.

By the end of the month, I was getting up fifteen to twenty minutes later than I had been initially, having decided that a bit later increased the chance for some color. I got more and more accustomed to snoozing my alarm, but I was careful to only snooze once and not just turn it off and think I would get up.

There were many days of rain all in a row in the second half of the month. Each morning presented heavy, dark, dusty blue or purple-blue skies. In the final thumbnails, where the days are shown in sequence, a few days are almost indistinguishable from each other, even though I painted each day’s view from scratch.

Rainy days and foggy morning skies often have a real similarity of color and tone, but they are never identical.

Because I was starting each day with a blank template with the frame in place showing the window and the landforms, I couldn’t see the image from the day before. Yesterday's light wasn't in my head. I was just looking at what I could see out the window and choosing colors, on the spot, to capture the sky before me.

It is interesting to look day-to-day at the similarities and differences and the progression over time in the full set. There is a clear correlation with weather and precipitation, of course, and it would be fascinating to see that play out over a larger span of days.

At Dusk

A number of you mentioned in comments to the original post about morning light that you either have done, or are doing, or are planning, a project tracking sunset. That is, of course, a wonderful project and a wonderful exercise in intentionality.

As I mentioned to several of you, making a point to see light at the end of the day was part of what I had hoped to do in November. It is one of the things that I mentioned early on that I had planned and yet didn’t make happen.

I do think it boils down to what we make happen (in many cases). I do think that we tend to have time for the things that we decide matter or the things that we really want to bring into being, and I think it’s absolutely okay to have lots of ideas and goals and plans and ambitions and yet only bring a few of those to fruition.²

When we look at projects that never take off, that fail, or that we let go, we can easily craft a list of excuses for why certain things don’t (or didn’t) work. But we can also point to the things that do (or did) work and realize that, often, it might seem that those things also wouldn’t work for us as sustainable projects or habits—and yet they do.

We make choices and decisions. It might be deliberate, or it might be subconscious, but we implicitly make choices about our projects when we allocate our time and energy. Sometimes we just forget or get busy or get distracted in a hundred ways and lose track of something that we were planning to do. We miss the window. We drop the ball. We feel too tired. We get sick. We have company. We think it doesn’t really matter anyway. Other responsibilities get in the way. We skip one day, and then two, and then we gradually slide into sporadic effort that trickles into a project left on the side of the road, abandoned. Or we bypass the halfhearted determination to salvage a project, bypass the slow decline, and simply stop.

In the days before November started, when I was thinking about what I would do this year in terms of tracking and in terms of gratitude, I was planning to record morning light, and I was planning on daily writing for NaNoWriMo. I was really hoping to make myself walk each day, at least indoors, and I hoped I might also leave the house and walk up the hill at the end of each day to see and photograph the light, which is what I have done in years past as a foundation and framework for a series of gratitude posts and podcasts in November. (Even last year, here at Illustrated Life, my logging of November gratitude was heavily focused on sunset.)

Leaving the house and walking up the hill are both placeholders for things that feel important right now and an accompanying mindset that I need to be reclaiming. I hoped I could use November as a rubric and a catalyst.

I didn’t.
I walked up the hill one time.

Despite my best intentions, I didn’t move away from my computer and walk up the hill each day. I would think about it and then, still working, get distracted and miss the scant window, the handful of minutes in which the light plays out, the sun sinking into the water at the horizon.

The only day that I walked up to look out over the ocean at sunset this month was prompted by a comment here from one of you. I walked up the hill, breathed deeply as I took in the color and the familiar silhouette of the trees on the hillside, and took a few photos.³

It wasn’t the most spectacular sunset ever, but it was perfect. It was what I had wanted to be doing each day. It felt right to be standing there. That walk and that view and those minutes are probably the most important ones for me. That I stuck with the morning light project is almost ironic because it is the evening light that fills me. Maybe I really just didn’t let myself follow through on my plan to walk to the top of the hill each evening. (There are lots of ways I could interpret that.)

There will be other years and other months.

Into December

One thing that a project like the morning light tracking highlights, in addition to the simple wonder and magic of this cyclical process of day and night, of the rotation of the Earth on its axis, is that we have no control over any of it.

I didn’t catch as many colorful mornings as I expected,

The morning light tracking project is technically over. As much as I didn’t like having to get up, I might continue this tracking a little bit into December. I am curious about the timing and the gradual shift that might be observed over a span of months. I’m definitely not setting anything in stone. I am biting my tongue to not say that I will continue this until the end of the year or that this would be an awesome year-long project.

It would, but it doesn’t feel like one I can commit to.

Maybe some month I will do sunset.

When I first began talking about the view from the top of the hill, it was with an awareness that I had, for years, taken for granted this vista that is yards from my house. That year, I was acknowledging that I will not always be in this house and able to have this view.

I have tried to keep that awareness in mind ever since.

That was a number of years ago.⁴ This year, those fears are even more real and present and potentially imminent. I have even more reason now to capture every bit of light and ocean view that I can because I do know the clock is ticking.

I am frustrated with myself that I didn’t take that short walk each day in November.

Having now done a digital version of the morning light project, I wonder about sunset. I think it would be much harder. The view is so much broader. It would be much harder to reign things in for a consistent thumbnail view. I’m not sure I have the skill for tracking sunset.⁵

The Idea of It

Tracking morning light. Tracking sunset. Recording shifting colors. This is the kind of thing I think about. I talk a lot about working in series, and I know that working in series is an approach that is really powerful for me. As the number of different small series I do grows, I really see the bigger picture and how I have these over-time projects that I think are incredibly important to my world view, my sense of myself as an artist, and my habit, routine, and well-being. I have no interest in doing something completely random and different every day. For some people that is the excitement of art, but I am much happier when I am in the middle of a series.

I like to look back at the various series that have happened over a year or in past years. Just in the last 12 months, there were nutcrackers, 100 days of comic affirmations, weekly self portraits, Illustrate Your Week as a framework for an illustrated journal, the weekly list comic, portraits in October, and then the morning light.

Those stand as only a few intentional series in this past year, and yet they feel like really clear anchor points to me.

I am thinking about December, although other than potentially continuing the morning light, I didn’t given a lot of thought to December in the days leading up to the start of the month. I’m starting out, already, feeling behind and planless. In some years, I have drawn ornaments and made that a very strong and clear foundation for the month in my journal. Last year, I drew nutcrackers. The year before that, I did a combination of gnomes and ornaments and maybe a few nutcrackers.

I have done a lot of talking in recent months about things I want to draw and work on, and I’m aware that I am not making any headway. In some cases, I may even be backsliding. I am really hoping that with the new year, I will find my footing again, but I also realize that part of that involves choosing, even if seemingly randomly, the series that I will work on.

In terms of closing the door on November and the morning light tracking as a project, mostly I’m just proud to have seen it through. When you’re just doing things for yourself and it doesn’t really matter if you stick with it or not, I think it can be really easy to let go. The only way to succeed with challenges like this, when no one else is watching, there is no external deadline you need to meet, and there is no money on the line, is to have a lot of self accountability. There were definitely mornings when I lay in the dark thinking, I just don’t want to get up.

But each morning I did, and as I would walk down the hall, I would glance out the bathroom window as I passed and immediately know whether or not there was going to be any color. Sometimes it was on a morning when I really thought, I just don’t want to do this because it just really doesn’t matter, that I was rewarded with a bit of color in the morning sky.

Even when it was just dusky blue, I was always glad that I did it.

I think when we can say that about the work that we do, we’re doing something right. I really hope that you work on projects that you feel that way about, too. Our projects don’t have to be popular with other people. Our projects don’t have to be things that other people are doing or even completely understand. Our projects need to be things that we enjoy, that bring us fulfillment, and that are satisfying when we see them later.

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Weekly Bits and Pieces

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 49

• Diary List Comics / 52 Weeks

• Postcard prompt no. 3

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Made It?

Thank you for reading along! I always enjoy your comments and invite you to chime in. Let me know what stands out for you, what you think after reading, or where we connect.

Do you have a project for December?

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1. It’s funny that one of the things that came out of this project is this acclimation to the terms used for light in the in-between hours. I mentioned to my son that I had been getting up early to do this light tracking project every day in November, as a way of noting one afternoon that I was tired. Even knowing that he probably wouldn’t think too much of my project as an art project, I showed him what the files look like in Procreate, and I explained that I was getting up about a half hour before what was listed as sunrise in order to catch this window of light. In summarizing the project, I used the terms dawn and twilight, and I could tell he thought I had at least one wrong word. I explained that the word twilight is used for the span of time between light and dark, both in the morning and in the evening. He thought it was only a word used to describe evening. That is exactly what I thought at the beginning of the project, too.

2. I refer to this process at important starts, like the new year, as panning for gold. This process plays out even month-to-month. I’ll be writing more about this in January.

3. This uphill walk is not far. It is a short distance but one that underscores how alarmingly out of shape I am this year.

4. I first did a 30-day gratitude-themed series of podcasts (called Spark) in 2017. I’ve done some form of gratitude series in most years since then. There are dozens of podcast episodes about gratitude, a number of posts, and several daily art projects. Note: the links between shows are currently non-functional, which makes it hard to follow the dots.

5. Maybe I should just do color without any attempt at it being representational…stripes of color.