To See In The Dark

Gliding through darkness, I reached up to adjust the headlight on my bike helmet. For an instant, the concrete path before me blackened, then glowed with the pale luminescence of electric light. My heart sank for a beat, yearning to witness again what I had seen in shadow.

What was it? What had I seen that fed me in that moment, that begged for me to return? I covered my light again. In seconds, my eyes adjusted to the dark, the swath of concrete path beneath my slender tires. Yes, that is what I had missed: the shadowland, a frontier to be seen only as my eyes would see it, a singular sense in shadows that only I can assign.

A sensation of fear pushed upward into my heart and rose to my ears while my hand simultaneously dropped and the light spilled cold to the concrete before me.

A choice to make. This is the lesson in my life, the lesson I see before us as a people. Alone in the dark, we can navigate with full autonomy only within the power of our footfall on the path. We can touch the beauty of light and shadows, the exquisite lens of each and every one of us capturing its own patterns, reflecting its own beauty back out into the world. But when we lift a tool to our aid, we are traveling beyond the realm of our power, beyond the realm of our autonomy and are suddenly in need of more external support to keep us safe and Strangely Sane in our world. As the tools "progress" so does our demand for more resourceful mechanisms to sustain us in superhuman flight across our planet, through our days.

My footprint is shaped by my footfalls, the beauty I perceive in my locale directly reflecting my ability to take it in... one breath at a time.

Next time, I will walk.