AWAKENING TO THE GOLDEN HOUR

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“Summer’s lingering light is slipping away.”

I read that line a couple of weeks ago in an article about sunset over New York and how last Wednesday would be the final day the city would see the sun set after 7 pm. The article explained how, beginning Thursday, September 18, sunset would arrive progressively earlier each day for the remainder of the year.

Farewell, long summer days and eight o’clock walks in golden sunlight; the days were getting shorter, nightfall was coming sooner.

Me in my new decade

On its face, the article was all about the change of seasons and our perennial transition from warmer weather and longer days to shorter ones and winter’s eventual chill. But for me, reaching my sixtieth birthday on that very day, it seemed much more foreboding, much more metaphor than meteorology.

While for all of us, the 18th of September this year signals the onset of shorter days, for me, reaching my sixtieth year, it represents something markedly more substantial–a landmark that lays bare facts now undeniable, an alert that escalates fears unavoidable.

Entering this new decade somehow underscores the urgency of now.

In the months and years leading up to here, I’ve been grappling with how to understand this slice of time, what to make of it, how to give it context. It embarrasses me to know that even now, my questions still outnumber my answers.

For starters: What’s in a birthday? What does it even mean? Is it a conclusion, or is it a commencement?

I suppose that depends upon whom you ask.

In common observance, I see so many birthday celebrants framing theirs in literary terms, the start of a new “chapter.” But they mistakenly label those chapters, misconstruing at the outset how birthdays work.

You might hear, for example, someone observing her 50th birthday, celebrating the start of chapter 50, misrepresenting how we even assign birthday years. Meaning that when we celebrate a 1-year-old’s birthday, we are in fact celebrating the completion of that child’s first year on the planet and the start of their second year of life.

Thus, this 60th birthday of mine represents entering my 61st year of life and, if you will, the start of Chapter 61, not 60. I’m already further down the path than that number implies.

And although the song says, “Age ain’t nothing but a number,” it’s nevertheless important to properly frame that number – if we agree the number matters at all.

The issue with how we observe birthdays is that these numbers we attach to our place in orbit are out of touch with how we scale the mountain of a lifetime. Our lives’ time is so much more seamless than the arbitrary notches that we carve into our belts.

Yes, there’s no denying that life’s locks and dams appear to tack to what we call age. New challenges, aches and pangs and awarenesses undeniably accompany the passage of years.

But so much of the time we spend here flows incredibly uninterrupted from stream to stream and reflects, it seems, the art of living much more than the science of living a life.

And so, I’ve taken to working better to understand how I’ve lived up until now and how I can best live until.

This search for understanding has led me to scripture, where time and purpose intersect with particular clarity. I’m struck by that passage in the Bible’s book of John that admonishes, “As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work.”

There it is once more, that juxtaposition of day and night, and the suggestion that day is the time we have available to work, to contribute.

Indeed, the creation story as told in the book of Genesis enumerates God’s myriad accomplishments in days, six of them in all, plus a day of rest. What we accomplish in a given day seems to matter so much more than the accumulation of the years we celebrate.

Even those of us who live fewer years have a lifetime of days to make a difference.

My issue with the days I’ve lived compared with the years I have remaining is a dismay over misspent time – the squandering of daylight. I wonder how much more I might’ve accomplished absent the burden of fears, failures, disappointments and inactivity. Given a chance at a redo, I’d have had many fewer spats and disagreements, spent much less time worrying and much more time doing than thinking about doing.

I would not have saddened some people I’ve made sad, would’ve made smile some people I’ve overlooked.

And I wonder now if I can squeeze that which is yet undone into what time remains. I wonder whether there’s enough time still to make a difference. “Summer’s lingering light is slipping away.”

60, for me, seems a wake-up call, my own personal reveille vaults me from barracks and calls me to order. I yet have energy to jump in the trenches and enough strength to stay in the fight.

To be sure, I’m now physically stronger and mentally more mature than before. In several respects, this version of myself—seasoned by experience, tempered by trials—has the necessary components to make a fairly good run going forward.

Still, that specter of nightfall looms. I can’t honestly say I don’t feel the dark hovering above my shoulder.

That said, I don’t fear the dark as even distantly it draws nearer; none of us should. If anything, it inspires me. For even in twilight, magic happens.

The greatest creation we know of – the birth of our planet – was born out of darkness. Some of our sparkliest sparks of inspiration ignite in those hours while the rest of the world lies in bed asleep.

It is in the dark where our candle’s light shines.

In that way, I see this milestone as a critical moment of ignition, generating more than enough energy for my star to shine brightly in the years ahead and beyond.

With 60’s arrival, I no longer fear the nightfall; I embrace it just as I do the day.

-Jonathan Clarke

(C) Copyright 2025, Jonathan Clarke, all rights reserved

Unexpected Thoughts of Healing: A Post-Trauma Minuet

Jonathan ClarkeLeave a comment

So, I’m moving about this morning tidying up, wiping down the kitchen counter, sweeping dust and stuff from the floor and out of nowhere here comes this thought: “He stopped a town hall meeting and swayed side-to-side to his favorite songs for THIRTY-NINE-FRIGGIN-MINUTES … and y’all STILL VOTED FOR HIM!”

Then I breathe one of those cleansing breaths, resume wiping and sweeping and dusting and moving on.

With trauma, it’s those random thoughts that get you, the ones that stop by without warning. Unwelcome visitors who drop by unexpectedly because they happen to be in the neighborhood. They help themselves to a seat at your dining table with the privilege of invited guests who’d received hand-delivered invitations sealed in hot wax.

They act all familiar like they belong here.

They do I suppose. I guess this is just part of the post-trauma minuet. I accept it for what it is and celebrate that I’m better today than yesterday and much more so than the day before.

I’m better. How are you?

(c) Copyright 2024, Jonathan Clarke, All Rights Reserved

Of Broken Glass and Rising Birds: A Last Word About the Election that was

Jonathan ClarkeLeave a comment

A night, a morning and much of a day have passed since voters overwhelmingly returned that man to office, and I’m still left without words. That’s not the same as saying I have no words. My arsenal is plenty sufficient to express how morose I’ve been and how deflated my closest friends have confided they’ve been all day too. Instead, to be left without words this day is to say I have too many of them, all jumbled up and out of place with nowhere left to go.

Hopefully, when I look back to reread this four, five or ten years from now, I’ll find something special; feel as if I shared something meaningful, said something profound in this especially jarring time. Here’s my attempt to lay the first plank of a new resilience we all will build together.

I want to feel as if somewhere in this fallow field, I’ve stooped to plant the seeds of new hope.

But something about yesterday seems to have scattered what hope I have to the winds to drift off in search of someplace where people appreciate that sort of thing, someplace where they treasure hope, someplace they deserve it.

Surely, The United States of America isn’t that place.

Here, we see hope flying proudly overhead flapping its outstretched wings above the calamity below, its face fixed on destiny. Yet, instead of raising our hands to salute its valiant charge, we take aim just because. We train our assault rifles on it, targeting its audacity. We do our level best to pierce hope’s chest and send it hurtling to the ground beneath to lie wounded and lifeless.

Surely, hope deserves to fly in safer places where it is less prone to attack.

Instead, time and time again, like that legendary bird, hope rises from its defiant ashes to take one more treacherous flight. Tonight, I wonder whether it will fly once more. I wonder whether there’s any fire left in its soul.

Yesterday, America told on itself.

We let the cat out of the bag. We pulled back the curtains to reveal our magic was an illusion after all. Volumes of talk about morality and fairness and better angels weren’t much more than smoke and broken mirrors.

Tonight, shards of shattered glass rest at our feet at the finish line of our foolish miscalculation. Believing the lie was our fault and ours alone. Stupidly, we believed the most honorable among us would care about character. We thought our neighbors would prioritize right over wrong. We naively believed the rule of law would run faster than every-man-for-himself.

Ah, but demonization is a fiery elixir.

What mattered to them most of all was knowing that when they pulled back their sheets the next morning, America was no less white and male-dominated than the day before and the idolatry of whiteness was no less powerful – no less supreme.

Yesterday was a referendum on White Supremacy and that – not the economy – was the top issue at the polls. It was about ego, not eggs.

And to find those people who opted in favor of a black-and-white, romanticized, revisionist greatness, you need not look very far. They are your neighbors, your coworkers, folks you once called your friends – perhaps even family. They are people he cares nothing about. They’re the ones who have least to gain from his policies – his concepts of them.

They are the people whose grandfathers resemble him reinforced with souls who’ve been indoctrinated deeply enough to revere slaveowners’ great-grandsons and great-granddaughters above their own majestic legacies.

It seems proximity to Making America Great-ness is enough for the ample few. That’s what today’s reams of election data have revealed.

Knowing this is heartbreaking. Deep down, some part of us was beginning to buy into the myth that better days were on the way, that this was the day we’d kick that football before she pulled it away.

We got got again.

And sobering though that revelation seems, it also is powerfully liberating like discovering your partner has been unfaithful just as you’ve long suspected. Finding out doesn’t cut any less deeply. But confirming your suspicions lets you exhale when the crying finally ends.

And the crying always ends. And the sun always lifts its face above the horizon. And the bird of hope always rises to fly again.

-Jonathan Clarke
@JonClarkeWrites