This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Heaven. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
I live at the edge of a big industrial park in Brooklyn, warehouses and factories slung low across several square miles, and the views from my wood-framed kitchen windows reach distantly east—to the greenery of a big park and cemetery in Queens, the glowing pinpoints afloat over Kennedy Airport, the line underneath the sun’s rising. It’s so beautiful, and such a comparatively rare perk in a standard-issue New York City apartment, that it’s just about worth the constant haze of cement dust.
In the early pandemic, sticking around in the daytime, I discovered that the late sunrises (currently 7 a.m.) accompanying my coffee ritual were only one benefit of winter—another being the southerly track of the sun, which shines in almost sideways to flood the two middle rooms of the railroad-style space (rooms stacked adjoining, no hallway), leaving my writing area brighter at midday than in the height of June. There’s a creative advantage in working first thing, just after meditation, when the sunrise is still in its long, gradient unfolding and the attentional deposits of the day are unattached: You don’t have the sun in your eyes.
But you can sit all day in a temple of light, as I learned in those Covid-homebound months, and it will fail to match what falls on your skin when you step outside. We’re fast enough on our own feet to pass in one trip through different weathers, to find a novel light on the side of the next island. No athlete can miss the advantages of lightness, and nothing beats the feeling of feet mostly in air.
I was on a transitory workaday sweatshirted run—to yoga, from swimming, my hand bloodied on someone’s jutting wrought iron in Chelsea—a few evenings ago when I arrived at the Hudson River edge of Manhattan. My gaze was taken west to a sky so big and auroral it looked like a hallucination or a stage set. Is New Jersey OK? I wondered as I stared at the sliver moon over Jersey City. Maybe the witches have won.
No one tells you about this, but it’s the best reason to move your body outside, around and up and down: the light. The light that clarifies with each step up a mountain; that turns into a teal heaven on the swimming leg of an ocean triathlon; that switches one chemical in your brain for another as you bike over the bridge. The way my lungs burned up a hillside in Los Angeles, back toward the beginning of all this—it’s memorable, but not nearly so much as the horizon glare of the Pacific that appeared at the crest of that climb, a gold wall hard by the limit of sight.
Light, in my opinion, is the reason for living—the reason it’s possible, the reason it’s worth it. Felt, heard, sung, seen. The light on your skin. The light that stirs you from sleep and onto the road. The light of colors you’ve caught on no edge of the world but this one, now. The light in the eyes of your love. You run to catch it, but not to hold on, because that you can’t—only watch for the dawn, and run to it again.
Coming Friday: Cats.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.