Last Ray of Light Over Tekapo — Shaugn David Briggs

The day I went to paint this, the scene wasn't giving me much. Grey sky, flat lake, mountains sitting there without any drama. It was the kind of afternoon that makes you wonder why you bothered making the drive.

But right at the edge of the cloud, there was a gap. Just a thin one. And I know enough about light to know that if the sun drops at the right angle, it can get underneath a cloud shelf and do something extraordinary. So I stayed.

For forty minutes, the grey held tight. Just me out there, wondering if I'd misread the sky. Then, slowly, a thin line of gold began tracing the cloud edge, barely there but building. And then the dam broke. The light didn't arrive. It charged, racing across the rocks toward me, this golden living thing moving across the ground.

I looked down at my hands and they were glowing. Literally glowing. I turned, and the mountains just ignited. Deep burnt orange against the snow, the whole range lit up like something from another world.

It held for maybe ten or fifteen minutes. Long enough that people started appearing from wherever they'd been, as if the light had called them out. I'd been alone the whole time, and suddenly there were others, all of us just standing there watching.

There's something almost spiritual about placing your faith in light from a star 150 million kilometres away, and having it arrive exactly where you knew it would.