Spring has arrived late to Vassar College this year. The Atlantic air remains caught in a tug-of-war with heavy jackets one day and shorts and t-shirts the next. Though the snow has melted, the gusts of winter linger. Thousands of miles away, desert air hums with heat, breaking historical records. The residue of climate change moves in disorienting patterns.
In the late afternoon, sunlight filters through the sparsely blooming trees under clear skies as shadows cast softly across the sidewalks of campus. Their shapes stretch over grass and return to green. In Japanese, there is a word for this: komorebi. A fleeting moment of light seeps through, easily missed unless I choose to notice it.
Lately, it is these in-between moments that feel most certain. They appear in passing: a quiet “thank you” as I tap my card at Gordon Commons or stand in line at the Retreat, a brief smile or none at all. These small exchanges shape the rhythm of the day.
Between sips of coffee and a hand idly twiddling a spoon, they emerge in conversations with someone new: a confession made and already understood. “A part of me likes feeling as though I’m a foreigner, like no one knows where I am or who I am,” a Vassar student said.
Where faces are hidden, recognition comes from sound alone. Sometimes, music drifts from the dish conveyor, and dining hall workers sing along, their voices weaving through the clank of returning dishes. The melody of My Girl by The Temptations lingered as I walked to class.
There is a custodial worker I see occasionally during my evening shifts in the Media Resources Center. We do not speak much, just a warm smile and a “hi,” but one night, standing alone at the sink, he tore a paper towel from the dispenser before my hands even left the water and handed it to me, then held the door as I left. We shared a simple “have a good night,” and the moment passed.
Standing in the balcony of the Vassar Chapel, I recorded the Art of Invitation choir concert on the evening of Friday, April 10. The nave below was filled with open seats. As I adjusted my camera, one older man quietly emerged from the stairs and sat a few feet away from me.
I wondered if it was a kind of solitude he had come up for, the space above acting almost like a small haven where the music carried a more personal undertow. My eyes kept returning to him. His posture was bent, his focus unbroken.
The echoes of “Ah Love, Let Us Sing” reverberated through the Chapel. We did not speak. I did not know his name, nor did he know mine. We remained strangers in the same moment, though with each crescendo, a connection formed that needed no acknowledgment.
In ENST-124-51, we looked at the phenological phases of trees across campus: the Yoshino cherry in leaf out, its petioles expanding in red and green hues, pale pink blossoms waning unevenly; a lone purple weeping beech, its branches falling inward, almost enclosing itself, just beginning to bud; a paperbark maple still dormant, its peeling layers revealing a rich cinnamon-brown.
From a bench or the pavement, fleeting silhouettes pass, each tree appears as it is: leaves turning and falling, branches brittling, flowers blooming. Only on the surface do they appear fixed; beneath, transitions unfold unnoticed.
Komorebi, not just the light through trees, but moments found in the margins, felt briefly.