Each day, as sunlight dims and dusk falls, I stop. For more than fifty years, I’ve watched the light turn to darkness, then closed my eyes to make the transition from doing to being, from fast to slow, from outward to inward.

For me, dusk, the time when the glare of the day diminishes but the blackness of night has not yet blanketed the sky, is a sacred time. So, I have paid attention to dusk, the time between the world of light and the world of darkness, and I noticed a feeling of loss as another day wanes and a feeling of eagerness as another evening embraces me.

Eager For What?

After some years of feeling precious intimacy with my breath, I realized that each meditation is like practicing dying, going deeper within, letting go of it all, and breathing out one last time. Then I realized, while writing this paragraph, that this ritualized practice has helped me to prepare for the greater Dusk—for aging consciously into the twilight of my time here.

Before we cultivate pure awareness, our inner world is splashed with the colors of intense emotions. We believe our fleeting thoughts, and we unconsciously identify with the shadow character that is emerging in the moment. In the context of aging, the result is grief, paralysis, shame: “I’m too old or weak for that,” rather than “I’m feeling weak today.” Or “I am useless,” rather than “I’m not feeling like doing much today.” We become lost in the shadow character—and have no portal to silence...

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