Illumine anew, auld lang syne-ing…
The candles and lights realigning;
A beam’s lifelong essence
(Far past phosphorescence):
A window through winter still shining.
This is a rare winter-break post, given a theme that has generally been on my mind as we (here in the Northern Hemisphere) progress toward our longest nights this weekend. It is a new poem, and it’s not one that would fit neatly into a NaPoWriMo routine, but it does align with some of the concepts discussed here. I’ll use more space than my typical 280 words in expanding it, as it uses more poetic license than is typical.
“Illumine anew, auld lang syne-ing… /
The candles and lights realigning.“
As we approach the holiday season and the start of a new calendar year, it’s inevitable to dwell in memory at times… to be “auld lang syne-ing,” to adapt a familiar phrase.
My family celebrates Christmas, with many traditions centered around candles, lights, and music. Moreover, having grown up in a parsonage, I remember well how these seasonal traditions fell into the precisely defined details of the liturgical calendar, during my childhood. The third Sunday of Advent was marked on the Advent wreath by a pink candle, rather than purple, designating it as Gaudete Sunday. Christmas Eve briefly brought a beautiful luminaria display: spanning the sidewalks approaching the church, promptly removed by the end of the evening. Our tree and home decorations came down on New Year’s Day, as Epiphany loomed and would mark the start of a stretch of Ordinary Time (not to mention the concurrent return of school-day routines and peak punctuality).
Reflecting on these traditions (in other words, “realigning” these sources of illumination) gave rise to a tangential memory, but a welcome one, this week.
“A beam’s lifelong essence /
(Far past phosphorescence)…“
Different chemical processes involving light can happen on different timescales. When a molecule absorbs light, it is energetically excited and can take many pathways due to this extra energy. Two of these pathways involve radiative decay: the excited molecule returns to its ground state by emitting light.
Two possibilities for this path are called fluorescence and phosphorescence. Of the two, phosphorescence has a much longer timescale (typically on the order of thousandths of seconds); it occurs much more slowly than fluorescence (typically on the order of millionths of seconds), due to the specific electronic behavior involved. Photochemical lifetime is a term that quantifies how long a molecule exists in the excited state: essentially, how long its glow can be observed. Both processes described above are quite fleeting, in terms of an everyday frame of reference, but phosphorescence has a lifetime that is thousands of times longer than that of fluorescence.
The light-related memory that came to mind this week was from years past, so the lifetime in question was far, far longer (to a comical extent) than even that of the relatively slow process of phosphorescence.
“A window through winter still shining.“
By the time I reached middle and high school, we lived in a relatively rural area, and so my bus ride on winter mornings was particularly dark. I remember mentioning once to Mom how much it helped break up the monotony of the ride (and thus alleviate my worry about the upcoming school day), starting back into the January routine, to still see occasional Christmas lights still scattered along the route.
Our own outdoor lights were relatively simple, lining a window facing the busiest road through town, which happened to be a fixture of the bus route. I noticed in every subsequent winter after that conversation that the lights stayed up well into the New Year: long, long past the formal start of Ordinary Time.
Years have gone by since Mom’s passing; many more, since the bus rides. However, the metaphorical lifetime of that window in winter persists: hundreds of millions of seconds, now; still counting; still shining.
Chemphasis 