Light arrives in whispers we can never hold. Each photon's journey ends the instant it meets our eye, transformed from traveller to signal, from wave to neural fire. We catch only the aftermath, the ghost of what was already fleeing. The red of an apple exists nowhere but in the marriage of wavelength and consciousness—perception itself, that strange alchemy where electromagnetic waves become colour, become meaning, become memory...
There's something achingly beautiful in how sight is always retrospective. Light from distant stars carries news of suns long dead. Even the face before you is a fraction of a second in the past by the time you perceive it. We live in the wake of the visible, forever reaching for what has just slipped away. Each blink is a small death. Each reopening, a new world that only resembles the last.
Kite Surfer, Alva Beach, FNQ (top) · West MacDonnell Ranges (Tjoritja), Southern Northern Territory (above) · Milford Sound (Piopiotahi), Fiordland National Park, South Island, NZ. (below)
The light doesn't care. It scatters, reflects, refracts—indifferent to meaning. But we, the watchers, we make cathedrals of the transient. We call the blur of photons "sunset" and weep at its passing, knowing it was never ours to keep. To see is to lose in the same breath, to hold and release simultaneously. The poets knew: vision is longing.
