The light was always there – our star is a hundred million years older than our planet – but it learned to see it, to use it, to transform it, making this rocky planet a living world: photoreceptors that transform sunlight into sugar and green on Earth, eyes that change consciously to give us books and beauty and blue.
In the very small daily scale of our short-term life, our life experience still depends on how we perceive the light of the world and how we view it through the lens of the mind.
The light of the sunrise is diffused through the maple leaves to light a dancing flame in your kitchen.
A brilliant blade of grass is illuminated by the morning light.
The sunset light on the smiling face of someone you don't know yet, yet you know, will be your lover.
The ten thousand flickering lights you see when you come home, each one is a human life both unconscious and invisible to all the others.
In the middle of the record of his pioneering journey to Labrador, Me Hubbard (April 15, 1870–May 4, 1956) enters what can best be described as part poem honoring the light, part prayer for a way of seeing that will never lose its sight:
Some evenings in cold November, when the clouds hang heavy and low, cover the whole sky, and the hills are cool and cool, and the air is cold, and the lake is dark and red, the breaking of the dark veil allows a splash of brilliant sunlight. It is so beautiful as it falls in the darkness that your breath catches quickly and you look at it with delight. Then you see it moving towards you. The moment you are in the middle of it, it falls towards you and seems to stand still as if it is meant to stay with you and not move forward. While you are enjoying this wonderful light that has stopped to cover us, it suddenly stops falling towards you, and you see it moving slowly and, outside the swamp with its evergreen border, touching with beauty all the land it falls on, it goes forward in the valley, without faltering, without stopping, until you catch your breath as you start to climb the hills over there. It's gone. Blue clouds of smoke hang low and heavy, the hills stand sad and frightened, the air is cold, the lake is dark and sullen, and the beauty is out of the swamp. Then it's night. But you don't forget the Light. You know it's still light – somewhere.
Couples with a blind French resistance hero on how to live in the light, then revisit Oliver Sacks on how love shines the light of life.
