Greenglow

Greenglow is an actual phenomenon. It's a state of light that comes after sunset and before dusk, near the afterglow. I wouldn't know it if I saw it, but I like the word, and what I want to talk about is a sort of afternoon greenglow, which I experienced yesterday.

It had been a terrible day. A classic "bad day," largely on account of the most persistent low-grade-misery headache I've ever had. I got into an argument with Mom (have you recently sinned against somebody you love dearly? It's awful!) and literally couldn't string two coherent thoughts together. At last Mother, who deserves full honors for being sweet to me when I was so very clearly displaying my sinful nature, sent me home. This was midafternoon, after I admitted that I could barely read the screen.

"Go sleep, Honey."

I got home, raging at myself, in tears, driving carefully only because my little sister was in the car with me--and thank goodness; I was in such a mood that I might have gotten myself into an accident through sheer carelessness. It was like being stung by a gadfly, this headache. It was like Alzheimer's too; I felt that I was losing all grasp of reality. For those few hours, I didn't much care whether I lived or died.

Everybody expected me to go to bed, but I believed that I would go insane in bed. So, I got my Bible and a notebook and a sweatshirt, and my phone in case anybody began to worry about me, and left the house. This was perhaps stupid; I could still barely comprehend the ground in front of me. But I went, and I didn't stop until I had gained the forest downstreet from our house.

From the moment I stepped down into the wood, my feeling of barely-controlled hysteria vanished. It was so cool and green there, so silent and yet so full of sound. Forests hum, if you've ever noticed. I found this out later.

I walked fast, because I knew roughly where I was going. Off the path, up the little knoll covered with trees, around to the place where you have a whole snarl of gorse bushes behind, there is a sort of alcove with a spreading branch overhead and safety from all human contact. A deer is about the most you can expect to find up on that hill. I waded to this spot through feathery eight-inch ferns and curled up on the ground. I don't think I moved again for two hours, but I didn't sleep either. I lay still and used my five senses.

Touch: the feather-grass, the hard earth, a stalk between my fingers, a translucent green leaf, sun-warmth against skin, insects brushing me in their dizzy flight, an ant crawling up my thumb...

Taste: in my seventeenth year I decided that a summer day tastes green, and I hold to that. The taste is a peculiarly heavy, rich, slightly damp and overpoweringly green mixture of summer air, summer earth, summer sweat, summer sun, all compounded and seasoned with attention paid to it.

Smell: again, it smells golden amd moist, pungent and warm, sweet-on-sweeter-on-sweetest, but never too sweet. Who can describe this properly?--not I.

Sound: the hum was astonishing. When I first lay down, it seemed blessedly silent, though I knew quite well that I would soon perceive otherwise. I did; a summer day in the forest incorporates every sound, from the mosquitoes whining above me to the chickadee in the bush behind, to the cars on a far-off highway, to the soughing branches and the footstep of a tiny white spider on his blade of feather-grass, not two inches in front of me. It sounded so alive! And it was a singing aliveness.

Sight: here the greenglow, here the glory. Green-gold always causes something inside me to melt, and it was everywhere. The leaves were green but golden, as though their whole thin selves had been transformed to sheets of translucent flame. Those branches had such hair, and tossed it about so carelessly! I saw a blackbeetle alight on a sunstruck leaf, glittering, and my heart constricted. I saw a dragonfly with tail of cobalt, jet-winged, hung suspenseful in clear sunlight over my head. My soul gave tongue to a joyous murmur, a babble of incoherent worship, which sprang bubbling up and soon overran its walls, soon knew no boundaries at all.

It was then that I was able to pray. Lying in the greenglow, I could repent and seek a renewed understanding of the gospel of Christ... and receive grace, and grow humble under it, wondering, grateful, glad, awestruck. It was as though I too turned to a sheet of green thinness inflamed with sunlight.

Then I closed my eyes and, without sleeping, lay unmoving an hour. I was safe; and it was so sweet to be still. Later, I slept, and awakened to a clear head.

When I climbed into bed last night, it was with a glance askance at the sheets and pillows. Who that has slept on God's grass in God's greenglowing afternoon is satisfied with a mortal bower? And, you know, that's the whole point. But in the soul, my dear... in the soul, one must be always outdoors.