Something I (apparently) wrote

While looking through my old journals the other day, I found this and thought it was still interesting. For your reading pleasure. Hopefully.

"The lamplight bends in the glass and diffuses through the handprints and smudges from hundreds of coffee drinkers and not enough washings in between. The sign across the street, “Latah County Title Co” is likewise bent and framed by the light. Light only travels in straight lines, they tell me, unless there is something in the way to bend it. But when is there not something in the way, I would ask, to bend the light and change it, something to take it and twist it and spread it around and make it less mathematical and more poetic? Specks of dust make the light shimmer, and leaves spread above us turn what is pure and hard into a luminescent glow of green. Even the rising of heat from the earth and from our bodies bends the light so that it wavers like a pool of water. There is always something in the way of light to bend it, to make it something other than what it was, in appearance if not in essence. . . and I am glad.

I am glad that we get to see the light through our own human personalities. I am glad that our eyes bend the light and focus it and make it into something that we can understand. I am grateful that we are not faced day after day with the hard edged reality of light in its purest form. Pure light we can only imagine. That kind of light, I think, would not be gentle with us. I think that it would be like a spear. I think it would fill us and be everywhere at once, glorious and terrifying and inescapable. I think that it is the kind of light we long for in one sense and dread in another."