Can you see the light?

image: Alyssa Ruggieri for Unsplash

Here’s something that took me a long time to appreciate.

I lived for several years in the mountains of Vermont, long enough to feel I belonged. Back then, we referred to visitors/tourists as “flatlanders.” It was how Jacques Brel referred to his birthplace, too, “my flat land, my Flanders.”

Nearly 20 years ago, finding myself living on Cape Cod, I truly internalized the meaning of that word: I had definitely become a flatlander. Because here it’s all pretty damned flat. And that was, at first, something of a detraction for me, the absolute sameness of the place, the flat lines stretching out everywhere.

Sure, it’s beautiful. But you look out at the ocean. And the horizon. And the sky. And okay, there it is. You’ve seen it all. No landmarks. Nothing to change the lines, nothing to draw the eye.

I’m not a visual artist, but I live among them. And I saw how, historically, this place has attracted painters for over a century and a half. Made it into an art colony. Nurtured talent that exploded all over the world. And continues to attract and amaze people who see things quite differently from those of us who don’t have a visual artist’s eye or a visual artist’s talent.

“It’s the light,” they say.

Okay; I was still skeptical. There’s light everywhere. There are a million places on the planet where dunes roll gently down to ocean waves, and the sun rises and sets on those places, too.

“No,” they say. “This is different.”

I believe, have believed for a long time, that subtlety is not an intrinsic part of human, and especially American, worldviews. We have to reach for it, search for it, analyze what we hear and think and read for the nuances that always, always give more than the headline, the tagline, the motto.

So I reached for some nuances here.

And when you look in the right places for the right things, you’re probably going to find them. I sat for hours at Coast Guard beach in North Truro, looking out at the water—next stop from there is Portugal. And then I went back the next day. And the next.

And I finally started to see it. Oh, perhaps not “the light,” but certainly the nuances, the changes, our flatlanders’ equivalent to Vermont’s beautiful mountains. Every day here is different. The shades of the water, the way the waves come in, the sound they make. Sunlight sparkling off on the horizon even when the beach itself is under a dark cloud. Birds screaming and wheeling overhead, diving suddenly beneath the surface for a meal. The sky, clouds scudding across the ceiling, or blazing blue on a hot day. And I wondered why it had taken me so long to fall in love with this place.

If you look in the right places for the right things, you will find them. I am clinging to that experience, now, as this country sinks further and deeper into the fever dream of anger and retribution, and every day brings a new horror into our lives and especially into the lives of those least able to survive them.

I am returning to Coast Guard Beach over and over again this winter, to the place that taught me all about hidden beauty, and I’m asking it to do it again. To remind me that régimes pass, people pass, even nightmares pass.

And I finally do understand “the light” now. It’s not just something out there; it’s also inside the people who work hard to keep it shining and bright and unique through everything an evil régime can throw at them. I’m trying to be one of those people.

Are you?

image: Taylor Rooney for Unsplash