A halo of light over Manhattan. Today’s New York Times announces that on September 15, 2003, Cai Guo-Qiang, the Chinese-born artist, will create a three-part pyrotechnic experience that will illuminate the New York City sky over Central Park. The display has “been created as a blessing for New York,” asserted the project director. The artist, Mr. Quo-Qiang, says that he intends the light display as a metaphor for “renewal, timelessness, benediction and wholeness.” Included in today’s announcement was the artist’s rendition of what his halo of light will look like when it floats in the New York City sky on September 15.

I had been thinking a lot about light, even before I read this announcement. Not too many weeks ago, I was struck by the unexpected beauty of light as I started down the staircase in my home. We have one of those sets of stairs that goes down for a bit from the second floor; then there is a landing. Then the stairs turn and go down a bit further to the main floor of the house. The builder thought to put two beautiful clear, etched-glass windows at the landing of the staircase. These windows were probably one of the reasons I was drawn to this house when we were looking for a place to live.

On this particular morning, I saw on the right-hand wall of the staircase a full replica of the glass window on the landing. It looks so real that you might think it was a window itself; and it was only the light coming in through the glass which was making a replica window on the wall where no window actually was. In many ways, the “unreal” window was more beautiful than the “real” window. I took several pictures with my digital.

Window Made of Light

The beauty of this “light window” stays with me. As do questions about “real” and “unreal.” When is something more beautiful because it isn’t “real”? I enjoy the real windows on the landing on my staircase; but I’ve never marveled, been stopped still, awed by them the way I was by the “unreal” light window made that morning on the solid wall.


The French writer Proust said once: “If I were dying,and the sun made a patch of light on the floor, my spirit would rise in happiness.” If you’ve read Seven Choices, you probably remember that I mentioned this quote when I wrote about deciding to put a skylight in my house after my husband died. And if you have read A Sacred Primer, you probably remember the story I told about the day when I was a little girl that I learned something about being a part of everything sitting on my grandparents’ farmhouse porch. Here is what I said in A Sacred Primer:

	Window Made of Glass; Window Made of Light

I was nine years old and visiting my grandparents on their farm in middle Georgia. It was an early summer afternoon. Grandma was at work in town, sewing doctors’ coats at the cotton mill. Grandpa was taking a nap before he went back to setting out sweet potato slips. I was sitting by myself on the front porch in a tall rocking chair with big wide arms.

Maybe it was the quiet everywhere. Maybe it was the little bubbles of molecules floating in front of my eyes in the hot summer air. Maybe it was the rhythm of the rocker. But I was pulled into something I had never known, a stillness beyond all stillness. My sense heightened and I could hear the corn blades in the field next to the house scrapping in the wind. I could feel their sharp sting as much as if Grandpa and I were walking down the rows looking for roasting ears to pull for supper. I could taste the mushy fig hanging on the bush at the edge of the porch. I felt the knobby trunk of the chinaberry tree. The corn, the fig, the tree–we were all one and the same.

And I could see farther than I had ever seen–all the way across the red clay road, over the pasture, past the stile Grandma and I climbed on Wednesday nights to go to prayer meeting, into the thick woods far in the distance. I could even see back into time, to the day when Daddy was a little boy and his baby brother fell into the water trough in the feed lot and drowned when nobody was looking. Back to the time somebody finally dug in the right place and–yeepee!–found the dishes and tableware Aunt Susanna had hidden that fateful day when Sherman’s troups marched through Georgia.

It wasn’t until the mailman honked to let us know Grandma’s package from Sears had arrived that I returned from the stillness. Returned, but forever changed. Even as a nine-year-old, I knew something important had happened. Today I can put words to the event. In those moments I knew another reality. I experienced timelessness and transcendence. In those moments of stillness I became one with all living things.

The stillness that day when I was nine was one with the light, the light that was like little floating molecules in front of my eyes. I’m sure, too, that you remember a time that light struck you as something amazing, sacred, full of awe, content-making, eye-opening. Isn’t it a paradox that something we can’t hold in our hands can make such a powerful impact on our hearts?