A Quality of Light

There is a certain quality of light
some mornings,
in the liminal moments
before it can truly be called day.
In this light, it can be difficult
knowing whether one stands
in a physical, grounded reality
or a state of incorporeal
intangibility,
where the merest breeze might
shred the very fibers of existence.

In those moments of neither
here nor there,
inevitably questions arise.
What is my purpose?
Why am I here?
How did “here” come to be in the first place?
Are the experiences contained in memory
actual recollection,
or are they phantasms -
fancies in the heated mind of an inconstant nothingness
that deludes itself for its own amusement?

And, if the assumptions forming the bedrock of existence itself
are not as steady as previously supposed,
how, then, to proceed?
Why the striving? 
Why the agony of an “every” day?
Why such preoccupation with achievement,
with entertainment,
with connection?
If nothing truly exists, and everything is
illusion,
why not dispense with the whole of it,
and rest, instead.

And yet…
If my choices do not matter,
if they are but window dressing in a grand theater
staged in an auditorium with no seats,
perhaps they matter even more.
Perhaps it is the shape I fashion
out of the formless void
that speaks to the substance of my self.
Perhaps it is the path I make
in the pathless wilderness that
testifies the content of my essence.
Perhaps it is the decisions I make,
the boundaries I inhabit,
that measure and establish the fabric of my being.

Maybe it is the action I take,
even with no faith to bolster its certainty,
that determines the nature of my existence.
There is no way to know, though. 
One can merely wonder,
when dawn presses against the windowpanes
and chases night from the air
by the application of a
certain quality of light.