Day And Night

I An Incident at 11: 00 am I met a man who told me Night is a broken thing which will never again be whole as Day is whole, and no measure of wishful thinking can change the reality of a glorious twelve- hour day crushing the dark remnants of night. At this point in his tirade, he smiled wickedly, and his stare cut through me. "You're a broken thing too, " he mocked. I felt my brain slump in a corner of my skull. "This isn't - right, " I thought. "There's something sacred here." I implored the man of day's ascendancy, "Partners in Time, surely day and night are partners, they make one whole. The brokenness of one is the brokenness of both." He smiled wider as if my statement cinched his victory. I tried to speak again to defend my beloved night. My lips flapped but no sound came forth. And my thinking I could see was blissfully asleep. Blissful. Sleeping. Are they not the genuine experience of the night? He sauntered away from me, into a blast of sunlight. IIAn incident at 11: 00 pm I found him trying to slip through a corridor at the edge of daylight, already pierced with tendrils of darkness. "Oh, it's you, " he said. Was he fearless? Resigned? Bored? Suddenly I felt a startling sympathy for him: he was neither my enemy nor my friend. What we became this moment would witness and certify. The sympathy within me swelled and unfolded the way darkness takes possession of a field of lilies or poppies or lilac bushes in early spring. I had to attend to these things of the night. Let him sleep or cower in fear, but I would not be the agent of either night move. I spoke to him in the voice of a night owl, the voice of a caressing nocturnal breeze, a voice of soft shadows: "The night invites you to join in her mysteries. The night blesses you whether you stay or depart. She is a queen who reigns but exercises no power." I withdrew quickly, so he could make his choice. I left him alone and free, in a time zone equally filled with darkness and light.