Seven answers to one question, and why what a thing is depends on the depth of the one who beholds it.
Ask a hundred people what light is, and you will hear a hundred different answers, and every one of them will be true, and not one of them will be complete. I have come to believe that the way a person defines a thing tells you less about the thing than it tells you about the person. What we see when we look at light is exactly the depth we brought to the looking. Let me show you what I mean. Let me carry one small question, what is light, from door to door, and let you hear how differently each soul answers it.
Ask a child, and they will tell you that light is the thing that lives inside the sun and the lamp and the smile of someone who loves them. It is what chases the monster back under the bed. It is the reason the sky turns gold in the evening and the reason colors exist at all. A child does not reach for an explanation, because a child has not yet learned to mistrust wonder. To a child, light is the warm and shining proof that the world is a good place to be, and that answer, for all its smallness, sits closer to the truth than most of the ones that come after it.
Ask a potter, and they will tell you that light is what reveals the truth of a form. I know, because I am one. At the wheel I cannot trust my hands alone. I need the light to fall across the curve of a rising wall to show me where it runs true and where it wanders, because a shadow will confess a flaw that my fingers would have missed. Light is the honest witness in my studio. It shows me what I have actually made, rather than what I had hoped I made. And when a finished pot comes out of the kiln, it is the light moving across the glaze, catching and pooling and sliding away, that turns a lump of fired earth into something that seems alive. To a potter, light is what lets a made thing finally be seen.
Ask a scientist, and they will tell you that light is energy travelling in waves, or in particles, depending on how you choose to look at it, which is already a strange and wonderful thing to say about anything. They will tell you it moves at a speed nothing in the universe can beat, so fixed and so absolute that we build our very understanding of time upon it. They will tell you that the light reaching your eye from a distant star left its home before you were born, so that to look up at the night sky is to look directly into the deep past. To a scientist, light is the oldest messenger there is, carrying its news across distances so vast that the news has become ancient by the time it arrives.
Ask a lover, and they will tell you that light is a face. It is the way a room they had walked into a thousand times becomes a different room the moment the beloved enters it. It is the brightness that has nothing to do with the sun, the glow they swear they can see around the one they love even in a crowd. Ask them what a house feels like after that person is gone, and they will tell you the lamps are all still burning and the place is dark anyway. To a lover, light is a thing you feel arrive, and a thing whose leaving can put out every lamp in a room that is, by any other account, fully lit.
Ask the dying, and they will tell you something that hushes the whole room. Many who have stood at the very edge speak of a light. A light with no harshness in it, a light that draws them forward without fear, a light that feels less like a place they are going and more like a person waiting. They describe it the way a traveller describes the lamp in the window of home, seen at last at the end of a long night on the road. To the dying, light is the thing on the other side of the door, and the strange mercy of it is that they seem to recognize it, as though it were something they had known long before they were ever born.
Ask a mystic, and they will tell you that every light you have ever named is only a borrowed thing. The sun is a lamp that will one day go out. The star is a fire already dying. Even the light in the eyes of the one you love will close in the end. The mystic will tell you that behind all these small and failing lights there is one Light that was never lit and can never be put out, a Light that shines up through things from within rather than falling on them from outside, the Light by which the eye itself is able to see. They will tell you that what you call light is only the shadow this greater Light casts as it presses into a world too small to hold it whole.
And if you ask me what light is, I will tell you that I have listened to all of them, the child and the potter and the scientist, the lover and the dying and the mystic, and I believe every one of them saw a true face of the same thing, and that each of them saw exactly as far as their own soul could reach. That is the secret hiding inside this whole question. The answer was always about the one doing the answering, and the depth of soul they carried to it. What a thing is to you is a measure of how much of yourself you have opened to it. And the light I have come to rest in is the one named in the chapter of the Quran that carries light in its very name. God is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The Light behind all of them, the Source that lends its shining to the sun and the lamp and the loving face and the glow at the edge of death. All the other answers, every one of them true, are lamps. This is the flame they were each lit from. The child’s wonder, the potter’s honest witness, the star’s ancient message, the lover’s brightness, the peace at the threshold, the mystic’s uncreated fire, all of it is one Light, wearing as many faces as there are eyes to receive it. Light upon light, the old verse says, and I understand it at last to mean this. However much light you are able to see, there is always more of it, waiting just past the edge of your seeing, for the day your soul grows wide enough to let it in.