Moving Dappled Light

Sometime in the summer, the photographer Cig Harvey posted a beautiful image of a young girl with a soft light illuminating her long hair. Her caption read "There needs to be a word for moving dappled light." I knew exactly what she meant as I had been studying that light in our garden all spring.  

It had been a softly changing shadow play against the stucco walls as the trees leafed out over April and May. Now the full foliage has deepened the dark, but afternoon winds dance the leaves to create the very definition of dappled. 

Is there another word for the effect? In this House of Sky, Ivan Doig describes a morning scene as brockled, but that misses the movement. One of Harvey's followers suggested lambent. I looked it up. Lambent light is wavering and subdued, the root is the Latin for lick. Close.

Instead of searching the dictionary, I sat in our garden basking in the afternoon light and listening to the rustle of the trees. Curiously, I had resisted my husband on the planting of these trees, fearing they would cut off  our view to the arroyo and our glorious Santa Fe sunsets. They do. But, the long row of trees planted just outside the garden wall— Canadian chokecherry, autumn purple and golden ash, plum, and of course, cottonwoods—shade the harsh sun of our western exposure and brighten my outlook.