BEGUILED BY NIGHT

This is part of a larger video about the pond, but it's here because I've always been beguiled by night

Fascinated by sunrise, I sit my seat in the garden shed well before false dawn creeps across the land where I live. As Earth rotates Priest and I inexorably east, the materiality of the atmosphere’s rare air high enough to see over the now silhouetted shadows catches glimpses of the radiant energy source and transmits them down to us as a gradual approach to full daylight.

Well after it is bright enough for me to write these words, Sol himself appears in piercing shafts of light, unabsorbed by the hungry leaves that recently grace the filigree of winter’s black branches with clothing of spring foliage, to strike our eyes with shocking directness despite the gentle announcement of its coming. These rays of pure white energy from that fiery orange ball are parsed into the daily spectacle of their sparkling spectrum as they strike the shiny slime trails of slugs’ overnight devouring the remnant meal of chicken feed and the spherical Pink Floyd prisms of dewdrops condensed upon the leaves of the garden vegetables.

Bemused by noon hour when shadows are their shortest, my flute and I respond to the spontaneous symphony of nature’s voices in a harmony unrehearsed, though variations of nature's theme are repeated every day. In a response learned in early chickhood, my fowl family returns from scattered scratch, scratch, peck, pecking for the resurging burgeon of insect life to be found over their eight acre hunting grounds, to enjoy the tattered tortilla’s I strew for their midday snack and a headcount by the mother hen I've become.

Intrigued by dusk, my seat in the shed transports me into the turbulence formed by the heated air of the day being cooled and driven upward by the cooler darkness of earth’s shadow overtaking us at the insensible pace of a thousand miles an hour as the light wanes as it had waxed in the morning. As if by precision meters, the girls return at a time varying with the length of day to roost for darkness’ duration.

Beguiled by night, my imagination is unleashed to create realities of invisibility to posit materiality behind the reflections of man’s puny lights off of beings found during the day by their shadows. Toads gather in the pond for bufo orgy time, filling our ears with roars belying their tiny size as they procreate polliwogs in a plethora of ova contained in ribbons wrapped around the stems of papyrus recovering from recent frostbite depletion them selves. The scent of a skunk, approaching with a curiosity equally beguiled by night, grows from my nostalgic fondness for its freshness to an odor threatening my gag reflex and fades again as she passes on. Priest is sensed more than seen as his paler shade of dark brushes my shins and hops into my lap for the umpteenth mutual appreciation moment of the day.