The pond is still as a mirror, with not so much as the tiniest ripple disturbing its glassy surface. Trees and buildings on the farther shores are mirrored perfectly, their reflections beginning where the actual objects end but for the slim streak of shoreline visible from this distance. Here, the view is toward the south and west, so the sunlight first makes its presence known from behind, gilding the slim tree trunks and pine branches that hang overhead, rendering in chiaroscuro each object it touches at this time of day. Later, if the sky is still this cloudless, the process will reverse, and the shadows will be on this side of the pond.

To anyone unfamiliar with the term, “chiaroscuro” is an artistic concept describing the juxtaposition of dark against light, in shapes and on surfaces, and how this is used in art. It exists everywhere in nature whenever the sun strikes a surface and floods it with light, thereby creating an opposite shaded, or dark, side. In reality, it is not possible to flood anything completely with light, and unless one aims several spotlights on an object from multiple angles or more than one sun were to rise in the sky each day, nothing can ever be completely illuminated. And it is this law that accounts in part for why objects appear to us as multi-dimensional, for without shadow, without corresponding dark sides or surfaces, no object would have shape beyond whatever exposed part of it that is visible to us.

Many of the world’s greatest artists appropriated the technique in their work. DaVinci, Botticelli and Rembrandt, among others, produced masterpieces in which it is used strongly to delineate certain shapes or more subtly to suggest the curve of an arm or the drape of a piece of fabric. In nature, it occurs effortlessly each time the sun rises or the moon casts its full intensity against the trunks of trees or an outcropping of rock.

Light travels in a straight line. While there is much more to it than that, suffice it to say that the light we see is just a small part of a much larger process involving a potent source of energy, whose most useful function to us is to give shape to the things we see. This is called optic ”“ or visible ”“ light, and it enables us to see the world around us as the shapes defined by light energy that simultaneously hits them directly and bounces off other surfaces to give them dimension.

Areas receiving less light, such as the cracks between roof tiles or the spaces between flower petals, give the tiles their familiar rectangular shape and flowers their innate beauty in a process that we take for granted most of the time. For who among us when admiring a beautiful flower arrangement takes into consideration the shaded areas between the foliage stalks or the shadows deep within each blossom’s petals? We see the whole, the sum and total of what the light has achieved by leaving certain parts of an object in shadows and shining more intensely and directly against others.

No matter where my eyes come to rest through my window on any given day, I see them ”“ the light and dark areas, nature’s chiaroscuro ”“ at work all around me. From the shadowy sides of the tiny waves across the pond’s surface, as the wind kicks up, and that give it its characteristic dappled look on breezy days to the dark swath across the bottoms of the trees along the shoreline, she is constantly at work with her brush. And together with the light, they give shape to these surroundings, delineating each precious thing that make this, along with any landscape they touch, magnificent to behold.

— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, who enjoys exploring the woods of southern Maine, can be reached via email at rachell1950@yahoo.com.