It's a common theme here in my blog, or anyplace my orphaned words find a home - in letters, e-mails, or any of a few former journals; the Movement of Light.
"He's a guard at a federal prison, for chrissakes," I said to myself after reading the article about a guard at the Federal Detention Center in Central Falls, RI who is suspected of murder. I thought, "I'd laugh if it weren't so sad.". And I caught myself gazing out the kitchen window at the moving light, at 2 PM, Sunday afternoon on a sunny Labor Day weekend.
I never recount anything in the present; even the current moment must be deftly deflected into the place where all my apparatus for examining and experiencing it are directed, the past. And to avoid having to actually wait for now to become then, I have invented a 'virtual past' into which I put now, safely seperating reality and me. It is like the big sealed glass glove box that lab technicians reach into through long rubber gloves to manipulate stuff which is either hazardous or absolutely positively cannot be contaminated by their touch. I like to say that I put this beautiful, gorgeous moment into that box. But it is more accurate to say that I put me into that box, and from there I beg the moment to touch me, gloved. It is never enough.
I've often wondered if we can detect the movement of light when the Sun - relative to Earth - begins to recede near the end of summer. Is the quality of that patch of sunshine on the lawn next door significantly different - except for the slightly repositioned shadows - than the quality of that same patch in the sunlight of May? Is the sky a little less blue? Do we have in our DNA some evolutionary memory that resonates with the movement of light? - a memory that tells us, near summer's end, to stock-up and seek shelter, even to prepare to hibernate? - an unbidden reminiscence of a delicious gentle warmth inexorably slipping away?