By Zhongfang
My first summer in Fairbanks, Alaska, I went outside late at night to find the sun still up. Not setting. Hovering. Sitting a little above the horizon like it had forgotten what it was supposed to do next. The street was empty. Nobody. I stood there with no idea what time it was, no reason to need to know.
I’ve gone back a lot these last few years, in different seasons. In winter, the light does the same thing in reverse. The sun comes up late, never really climbs — it slides along the horizon, low and orange, for a few hours, and then it’s gone. The dark is long. Opposite skies. Same effect. The light up there refuses to keep time.
Back home here, light is a schedule. Morning means the day has started. A day starting means a list. Evening means the list is finished or it isn’t. The sun tells me where I am in something.
Up there in those seasons, it doesn’t tell you anything. It just does what it does, slowly. Somewhere in those trips, I stopped counting. Not only hours — I stopped optimizing. I stopped running the list. I forgot the phone, the unread messages, the dozen pending things. Not by discipline. There was just nothing in the sky telling me to.
I should be honest, though. I was a visitor. The midnight sun and the winter darkness came to me as something uniquely beautiful. People who live there get that extended darkness as a weight. Months of it. I don’t want to sit here and recommend Alaska, a place I only borrowed. I was given the light without being given the year.
Then I came home.
It returns on its own – that street, that low winter sun. In traffic, in the middle of someone talking. The image of myself standing in that street, sunlit at eleven at night, flashes into my head in the anxious minutes before a high-stakes meeting. Something in me leaves and goes north.
What we practice in this room is the opposite of going away. I haven’t resolved that. But one thing about the memories that keep coming back: in every one of them, I’m not doing anything. I’m watching light change – watching memory, the way you watch a movie. Detached.
Down on the coast, in Seward, I spent hours sitting by the water, watching the light change. It starts bright. Gold on the snow. Then dimmer. Then blue comes into everything. Then a darker blue. Then the mountains are only shapes. Then black. Nothing happens. That’s the whole thing. I sat and watched the light go. It took exactly as long as it took.
I used to think this experience only belonged to the north. Then last summer, it happened closer to home.
I spent long days flying over the Sierra. Near the end of them, the light goes long. The clouds. Then the ridges — golden, then pink, then blue, then just shadow. I watch it and don’t reach for anything. Sometimes it’s quiet. Sometimes it’s a little chatter or jokes on the radio. Sometimes it’s the usual busy NorCal sky, airliners lining up to get into San Jose. None of it matters. The light isn’t telling me the day is over, or what I haven’t finished. It’s just light, doing what it does, slowly. Not about me.
So maybe what I go north for isn’t a place. Maybe it’s a kind of light. Maybe I don’t have to go north for it.
I still drift. I was drifting in the last hour — right here, with all of you, in this end-of-summer morning light.
I don’t fight it as much now. I try to notice, coming back, whether I returned softer or only lost twenty minutes. Usually, it’s just the lost time. But every once in a while, it’s light.
Hakone Zendo 