25 March 2025 – Politically, the world grows steadily darker. All the more reason to notice and embrace light, whenever and however it presents itself. It, too, is real, and it offers us courage and strength and joy.

I am giddy with it, this early-spring evening: temperature well into the teens, and each day longer than the one before.

It is 7:30 in the evening, and the sky is still bright. The crows have not yet flown home to Burnaby (mid-winter, they go through by 4:30 or so), and — look — golden sunlight still bounces off the library branch window opposite my building.

Here’s the source: the sun just dipping out of sight in the western sky, the sky itself warm with rosy-gold.

Over at Dude Chilling Park, just minutes later, women chat beneath a sky that has now lost its rosy-gold, but is still bright with pink and blue.

Daffodils offer their own gold to the sky, tall against the community garden fence. Warmth & light inform the scene: children romp just inside the fence, parents call encouragement from the far side of their allotment and, behind them, the west face of the school building is a-glow.

But by now, natural light is fading fast. Tree branches are black against the sky…

and it is street lights that illuminate these butterfly ornaments draped on a residential tree…

and it is the security light in someone’s yard that pops my own silhouette back at me from the directional arrow in this traffic circle.

Car lights glitter on the leaves of a street-side hedge…

residents’ lights tumble a visual waterfall through this apartment building…

and the entrance to a neighbouring building punches its shaft of light & colour out onto the street.

Only 45 minutes since I left my door, and artificial light, city light, is now dominant. I peer down an alley, looking for a bit of sky that is still itself, still wears its own colours.

There.

The last washes of indigo and pewter-grey.

Good night.