Many years ago I read a biography of the 19th century British aesthete Violet Paget, who wrote under the pen name of Vernon Lee.  Violet's life seemed to have been blessed by the gods.  When still a young woman, she decided to live out her life in Italy, where she could study great art, commune with other aesthetic souls, and enjoy living dolce far niente.  This is pretty much how she spent the remainder of her days:  studying aesthetics, writing books, and finding beauty every time she turned around.  Violet was able to live this kind of life thanks to an annuity from her industrialist grandfather, which kept her fed and housed as long as she lived.  She always had enough time, space and freedom to do exactly what she pleased, and what she was pleased to do was surround herself with beauty every moment of her existence.

Well, this was one of the few times in my life when I turned absolutely pea green with envy.  What a way to live!  What a flawless state of being!  To escape your drab provincial town, relocate to Florence or Venice, and spend your whole existence in contact with some of the sublimest works of art ever created.  Even more:  you would get to discuss art and poetry with kindred souls every day.  No time clock, no deadlines, no stress, no bills, no processing invoices or designing spreadsheets, not when you get to spend your hours contemplating Caravaggio or Bellini.  How lucky can anyone get?

And everywhere there would be beauty.  In Florence or Venice you wouldn't be assaulted by the light of the golden arches, utility wires, used car lots, shopping malls, Budweiser signs, crushed plastic bottles, and all the other grand and glorious sights of an American town.  Scream... fury... murder...  Why couldn't I live a life surrounded by beauty?  Why couldn't one of my idiot relations have left me enough money so I could settle down in Italy and surrender my soul to the splendor of the Quattrocento?  Why was I stuck in a world covered with asphalt?  Where could beauty be found in my humdrum Midwestern town?

Why--everywhere, of course.  As I grew older, I began to realize that the greatest artists and poets didn't need some kind of special environment to find meaning and beauty:  they could be found anywhere on earth, even in a small Illinois town. If you opened your eyes and just started to look at the world around you, you could find something beautiful every blessed moment of your existence, in all the wondrous sights and sounds that surrounded you.  After all, Walt Whitman only needed leaves of grass to find meaning and beauty in his life.  He even tells us in The Mystic Trumpeter that all you really need out of life is simply to be ... alive:

The ocean fill'd with joy--the atmosphere all joy!
Joy! joy! in freedom, worship, love! joy in the ecstasy of life!
Enough to merely be! enough to breathe!
Joy! joy! all over joy!

This was one of the breakthrough moments of my life.  Until this instant I had never realized that the universe was showering incredible beauty, wonder and splendor down upon me every moment in my life--even in an ordinary Midwestern town.  All I had to do was start paying attention.  What more could I possibly want than what I already had? I had birds and trees and breezes and butterflies, I had roses in the spring and sunflowers in midsummer, I had the wide open sky with its ever-changing pageant of clouds, I had rain and mist and snow, I had the boundless prairie's ever-receding horizon, I had hawks soaring through the skies at dawn and sunlight sparking on the dew.  I had the richness of the summer moon in the black velvet sky and the thrilling pageant of the stars every night.  When you've got magnificence like this every day of your life, who needs Florence?

The more I started to pay attention to all the natural forms and forces which surrounded me, the more I realized that I could also learn certain basic spiritual or metaphysical truths from what I was seeing and hearing.  After all, this was how ancient Chinese philosophers came to an understanding of the Dao:  they knew that the natural world which surrounded them was radiant with a spiritual significance which could be conveyed and understood.  When they wanted to understand existence itself, they didn't go to books or to a spiritual leader--they went out into the world of nature to learn what they could.

I spent the next few years trying to follow in their footsteps.  I started to pay attention the movements of the sun, the moon and the stars, I tried to feel the energies of the winds and the waters, and I carefully watched seasonal changes and weather patterns.  Did I learn anything?  Probably not much, except the unoriginal notion that everything about our universe is in constant movement and flow, and that when you let yourself get stuck in something you end up completely dead.  But I do like to think that I did discover one very important metaphysical truth from the natural forces which surrounded me.  Maybe this is only vanity or delusion, but this discovery made sense to me and ended up making a great deal of difference in my life.

What I discovered was there were special places of intensity in the natural world where the energies were always very concentrated and vivid.  In these places it actually seemed like some kind of spiritual or metaphysical revelation was possible.  I am talking about boundaries or thresholds, the kind of frontier which separates one reality from another.  The threshold of a house is this kind of boundary, a place which is neither inside nor out.  Crossing a threshold was always of great importance in the old fairy tales, since it was an act which could take you out of your normal day-to-day reality and transport you into a different world.

I started to realize that these kind of thresholds were all around me in the natural world.  For example, any place where earth met water was this kind of threshold, a place of quite forceful and vital power.  Earth and water, of course, are two of the four primal elements which constitute our universe, and when they come together some kind of special energy is generated.  Beaches, lake shores, riverbanks...  all these are places of special power.  I have read that medieval Irish bards would always go to the bank of a river or to the edge of the sea when searching for inspiration, divination, or wisdom--they must have realized the the energies of these special places would fill them with the kind of stimulation that they needed.

But I also discovered that there were special thresholds of time as well, and in many ways these thresholds were even more potent than what you could find in the physical world.  I am talking about shift moments like new or full moons, the start of a new season, or solstices and equinoxes.  When I started paying attention to these kind of threshold moments, I began to realize that something mysterious always seemed to happen whenever they occur.  If you pay close enough attention to the energies of a time threshold, you will discover that during these special moments the physical universe almost seems to drop away, leaving the world of the spirit visible.  I quickly learned that there was one particularly intense threshold moment, when these kind of energies were at their strongest.  This moment came to us every single day of our lives.  It was the threshold of twilight.

Discovering the importance of twilight was another of the breakthrough moments of my life.  I realized that the twilight which we experience every twenty-four hours of our lives can be one of the most intense thresholds we can know.  Twilight is a dramatic moment between the familiar and the unknown, between the prosaic reality we are accustomed to and the spiritual reality which exists beyond.  Twilight is both a time out of time and a place out of place.  All of which means that it can give us some of the most important spiritual lessons we can ever learn.

This will probably be a difficult statement for people to accept, at least initially.  I am aware that the vast majority of people in this world would actually prefer to watch television in the evening instead of paying attention to the twilight.  Poor dear fools--they don't know what they are missing.  The twilight which comes over the earth at the end of each day happens to be a precious gift which can shift us into a completely new way of being.

At this point, my reader is probably wondering if there is any common sense behind what I'm saying, or whether it is all just mindless babble.  Well, bear with me a little longer. 

To begin with, twilights are always moments of perfect tranquility and repose.  When the shades of evening start to rise out of the earth, if you simply stop whatever you are doing and allow their calming energies to affect your being, this alone is enough to move you into a different kind of consciousness.  This is perhaps the key secret to twilight:  it dissolves everything, up to and including your problems, your burdens, and your psychodramas.  They all simply float away into the darkening ethereal air.

Next, twilights are always moments of great beauty.  For all that I've just said about finding beauty in your ordinary American town, this isn't always the easiest thing to do, not when your eyes are constantly assaulted by by the spectacle of dumpsters, dog poop, smashed beer cans, messy houses, rusty Buicks--I could go on forever, couldn't I?  What you need to remember is that nothing is ever ugly in the twilight.  When the light starts to fade all that is harsh or vulgar in our lives simply dissolves away into darkness, and everything takes on a new and otherworldly splendor.  The old Scottish word glamour always had connotations of twilight, when beauty could always be found while roaming in the gloaming.  You want some glamour in your life?  Forget about watching your average Hollywood bimbo--start cultivating the twilight.

Twilight also engenders a sense of balance.  After all, it is a moment which is in perfect equilibrium between day and night. You sense that two different kinds of time are coming together in perfect harmony.  In other words twilight is of itself a kind of centering.  And this is one kind of centering which doesn't require that you work at it, nor practice it:  all you have to do is just lean back and enjoy...

But if you're a poet (or at least someone who aspires to be one), you will also discover that twilight is a time when you need to grow ever more alert.  In the gathering dusk, everything which surrounds us loses its familiarity. On the one hand, objects and forms become blurred and unrecognizable, but on the other sound, fragrance, breezes grow ever more miraculously intense.  I have learned that this kind of disorientation can frequently be accompanied by creative reverie.  The mind is never fixed at shift moments like this--it wanders at will into fertile space where new inspiration can be found.  There is no time like the twilight for new words, forms, or ideas to appear in your mind.  I always have pen and paper ready so I can start scribbling down the thoughts that inevitably come when the light is fading.  Sometimes I keep writing until it is too dark to see.  The words and concepts that come to me during the twilights frequently have an extraordinary vividness and are poetic in and of themselves, even if I can't always arrange them into rhythmic form.

Here I must offer up one of my pet theories about artistic creation.  I have long been convinced that the greatest poets, artists, and visionaries have always had one thing in common, namely an ability way to surrender their egos and enter into some kind of communion with something outside of themselves.  This is what happened when Keats, for example, blended his own consciousness with a nightingale, and Van Gogh became one with sunflowers.  You do not need any kind of special genius to do this--you simply need to find a way to let go of your self-conscious ego and become pure awareness.  Well, there is no time like the twilight to help us release our conscious personality.  As the darkness increases, the physical boundaries which separate you from the world vanish into nothingness.  If you want to experience the world with the kind of rapt intensity that a great poet experienced it, all you need is a twilight.

Twilights are also special moments of psychic intensity.  You are always able to divine things better in a threshold moment.  I have written elsewhere about the things you can to do increase your psychic skills and won't repeat myself here.  But if you really want to practice effective divination, do it in the twilight.  There are oracles, but then there are also twilight oracles, and there is no oracle like a twilight oracle.

Twilights are also special moments when we can start to sense the inner spiritual reality of everything that surround us.  If ever there is a perfect moment which can give us an inkling of spiritual truth or mystical vision, it must surely come at twilight, when form dissolves into shadow and darkness. In the Homeric poems, the gods would frequently appear at dusk, in that special moment when the physical world is dissolving into nothingness.  Innumerable mystics both East and West have also found that the most intense spiritual illumination can come in these special moments. In a long, lingering twilight, the unseen can become as real as the seen, time becomes timeless, and it actually seems as though the world of the spirit becomes visible.

All of which means that if start making time and space for twilights in your life, something will shift within your existence. The world of the spirit will grow much more real. You will be able to attain a feeling of mystical connectedness to the physical manifestations of the world. You will start to feel as though you can indeed escape time and space any time you wish. If nothing else, the simple act of experiencing a betwixt and between is guaranteed to engender reverie and dreams.

Then what? Can I guarantee that you will enter into the world of faerie? Or that you will be able to sing like Taliesin? Of course not.  But just try a twilight sometime.  Absorb its grace and beauty into your being.  You might just be surprised.

I have assembled a brief collection of poems and prose about the twilight, which can be found starting here.

Twilights  •  William Butler Yeats   •  AE   •  John Cowper Powys   •  Anna de Noailles   •  Chinese Twilights   •  Japanese Twilights