Gloaming

This week, I am obsessed with words. Particularly, I want to know the words that we are tied to. For example, I have a strange association with the word 'shame'. Inexplicably, the word connotes a feeling of gnashing teeth every time I hear it. I'm most-fascinated with words that nag me- words that carry such weight, I fall in love with them.

The word that currently fills my peripheral vision is 'gloaming'. I had heard the word a few times, but two years ago, as I was re-reading Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, I came upon the word and it inescapably burned into my mind. I had read Tolkien's trilogy twice before so I had surely read it before. Yet I was caught. I found myself injecting it into conversations and searching for opportunities to weave it into my writings.

It is defined in The New Oxford American Dictionary as a "twilight; dusk". The word is from Old English and from the Germanic word for 'twilight' and the word 'glow'. As Tolkien wrote it, and I imagine it, gloaming is that fleeting pause in breath between day and night. The world feels mysterious and full of anticipation. Dawn carries the pause to the nervous anticipation of a new day, while the gloaming possesses a reckless, Dionysian bent to it. Perhaps it is the way I feel at this point in my life. It is where I live- a space dancing along the edge of consummation. As I stand at the edge of another great life change, I peer through that mystical, gloaming light and wonder if, perhaps, despite the best-laid plans, I can glimpse the forces that will carry me on another unexpected journey.