“She carried a basketfull of flames, but whether fire or flowers
with crimson petals shading toward a central gold,
was hard to say—though certainly, it burned,
and the light within it had nowhere else
to go, and so fed on itself, intensified its red
and burning glow, the only color in the scene.”
Eleanor Wilner , The Girl with Bees in Her Hair
A long time ago, Annie Dillard (In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I think) wrote an essay about a person, blind from birth, whose sight was restored when they were an adult. The problem was, their brain didn’t know how to interpret what their eyes were seeing. Upon seeing a tree, back-lit from a low sun, in the brilliant colors of autumn, the newly sighted person called it a tree of lights.
Wouldn’t it be fun to see something in your garden so new and fresh that your brain didn’t know what to make of it? I wouldn’t want to go blind first, but I would like to be able to see things with new eyes. Especially in this black & white month when there’s nothing much happening outside.
