I awake, and when I do the beauty of the world however fleeting, fills me with an incontestable joy that leaches right into my bloodstream. I need only allow it in. Born into a world of light, my senses mature and decay. But until they do, they are the gateways to the mysterious kingdom in which I find myself, one I could not have imagined, a land not entirely of hope and glory, yet no less beautiful because of that.
We exist as phantom, monster, miracle, each a theme park all one's own, and mainly unknowable in the end, not just to others, but to ourselves as well. I often think about the charade of trying to capture a self in the mirror. One day we feel like the toast of the town, the next day the hoax, one moment flighty, the next fully present for and part of life's contrapuntal fugue. Think about the lunacy of the moon landing, the lunatic fringe of loons on a lake in the Aleutians. A word is a kind of pebble in the hand, at once irritant, worry bead, reminder. Nothing surpasses the single suchness of this moment. Presence is always a present, a gift intransitively given, in some stage of unwrap, waiting to be explored.
Diane Ackerman, from Dawn Light
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