DANCING WITH THE LIGHT – An Ode to Dappling

“Glory be to God for dappled things.”

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS ~ “Pied Beauty"

One perfect June day a few years back Sally and I were biking the beautiful Cannon River Bike Trail in southeastern Minnesota.

I don’t recall why, but I ran out of steam on the return leg and just couldn’t pedal another meter. So Sally went on, offering to come back with the car and pick me up. While she was gone I lay down on the cool grass in the sun-dappled shade of a small tree. I don’t know how long that delicious, breezy cat nap lasted, but when I awoke I was not alone.

All around me shimmered the unmistakable spirit of my long-deceased father. Alas, I couldn’t actually see him. Nor could I hear his voice, but he was there, occupying the spaces between those dancing daubs of light, as sure as if angels had borne him to me from the beyond.

His closeness filled me with awe, moved me to tears.

         

          Dappling is to light what pointillism

          is to paint. It’s sunlight sprinkled,

          not poured.

ONE PERSON’S DAPPLE
As I recall that poignant moment, I realize it’s not all I have to say about that enchanting dance of light and shadow we call dappling.

First of all, what is dappling? The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines the noun form, dapple, as: “any of numerous usually cloudy and rounded spots or patches of a color or shade different from their background.”

It’s interesting—and true to my experience—that dapples, whether strewn on the ground, an animal or any other surface, are indeed “usually cloudy,” meaning they don’t have distinct outlines. I’d go so far as to say they’re always cloudy; if they weren’t, they’d be spots or blotches…or something else.

       

Interesting, too, that the definition says nothing about how much of an area has to be covered in dapples before one can call it dappled. Would a black mare with, say, two grayish smudges be considered a silver dapple? Is a northern pike a grey-green fish with white spots or a white fish wrapped in grey-green lattice?

For the purposes of this treatise, I’m going to just declare that for something to be called dappled, the dapples must cover somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the surface. And that for sunlight the absolute best ratio is 40 percent sun to 60 percent shade. (The weighting toward shade means the sun-dappled area remains cool. And it allows plenty of space for the light patches to remain distinct even while jostling around.)

      It is a psalm of praise to God for the bounty
      of beautiful things in creation that are not
      homogeneous.

SPRINKLED, NOT POURED

There’s a good reason why Georges Seurat and some other post-impressionist painters explored pointillism and its cousin chromoluminarism (also called divisionism). The theory was that, instead of mixing primary-color pigments to achieve desired hues, those pigments could be applied to the canvas right from the tube in distinct daubs or dots, leaving the blending of those colors to the viewer’s eye.

 

The result lent such luminance and energy to the paint surface that it suggested movement, a sense that those tiny dabs of paint were still falling onto the surface from the artist’s hand.

Dappling is to light what pointillism is to paint. It’s sunlight sprinkled, not poured.

BY ANY OTHER NAME

Nature provides countless examples of otherwise flat surfaces brought to life by spots of light and dark, of various colors. And with them, just about all the synonyms we’ve had to devise for dappling: Variegated leaves, spotted leopards, speckled trout, brindled puppies, mottled skies, freckled faces, pinto horses, calico cats. Oh, and pied pipers.

That’s the kind of beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet, teacher and Jesuit priest, wrote about in the summer of 1877 in his sonnet, Pied Beauty, inspired by the countless patterns he observed in the Welsh countryside. It is, above all, a psalm of praise to God for the bounty of beautiful things in creation that are not homogeneous.

         Sun-cast shadows retain the shapes
         of the objects causing them, while holes
         in the very same objects, no matter their
         shape, nearly always project circular
         dapples.

WHAT GOES IN...
When sunlight filters through the spaces between leaves, each of those spaces acts like the pinhole of a pinhole camera. In other words, as a lens. And, as with other lenses, what shines into them is the same shape as what comes out the other end and projects onto a surface. Since the sun's light is normally a circle, it doesn't matter if it goes through a square hole, a round hole or a triangular hole. As long as the aperture is reasonably small, the light projected will be a circle.

Ample proof of this appears each time there’s a solar eclipse, when the normally round pools of sunlight cast by the spaces between leaves turn into thousands of little crescents. The "lenses" haven't changed, but the light source has.

A MATTER OF SCALE
Enough of shape. Does dappling have a size? Could it be done by something bigger than tree leaves or little waving flags? How about bed sheets swaying on a clothesline? Or clouds?

Have you had experiences caused—or at least accompanied—by dappling? Of sunlight, color? What? Can you think of any parallels to other aspects of your life where heterogeneousness has brought extraordinary richness and energy to the moment? We’d love to hear your story!