MORE PHOTOS FROM PURE LAND MOUNTAIN

THE DAILY LIGHT

Had a big frost last night, to let us know in the clear blue morning that there's a genuine winter around here somewhere, so what a show there was at sunrise. Not long after the golden messenger got high enough to broadcast the early edition of the Daily Light, every leaf and needle of every evergreen exposed to that warm announcement, every papery leaf of the drooping bamboo was painted with light that danced in the barest morning breeze. From the tip of every leaf hung dewdrop ornaments of all the colors, the sunsides of whole mountains of trees shining as if dipped in a rainbow. Through the trees against the horizon you could see tiny glimmers of violet, gold, silver, green gathering at the leaf tips, sparkling on a breeze too light for skin to feel, flashing through all the rainbow colors as they grew and wavered in the moving air, swelling and swelling until it came their turn to drop a quicksilver bead splashing rainbows through other leaves and to the ground, where the white of the frost still waited down in the shade for the touch of day.

What a show. Fortunately I had a ticket.

REAL RAINBOWS

This bright morning I traced a rainbow that arched from somewhere around Steve's house all the way to Mt. Hiei, and stood there swimming in the vision. We get full and long-term rainbows all the time out here, as compared to the couple of minutes of barely distinguishable portions of arc we used to get sometimes in the city, kind of faded and archaeological, like an artifact that disintegrates on contact with modern air, such as that is, but these arches of light we see against the mountains and the Lake are real rainbows, rich ones, wide ones, full ones, all the way from here to there, pots of gold everywhere, from violet to orange with all the in between, and you can't help but stand and ponder (unless for some criminal reason you're in a hurry) that you can't find the edges to the rainbow (but the rainbow is distinct, isn't it; yet it isn't, is it), and none of the colors have an edge but they too are distinct but not, which leads you to realize as you stand there, fully rainbow-minded by now, that this small band of colors we are vouchsafed to see is but a small segment of the infinite stretch of vibrations there are; that sound and gamma rays are of the same continuum, as are all other 'waves,' including us, and why in the world should we see only this little bit, would it be too much if we could see it all; and in a way we're seeing with our ears when we hear sound waves, and hearing with our eyes when we see light waves, and hearing/seeing with our skin when we feel heat waves, all part of the one continuum we chop up into different senses; and in the very same dark-age way that we used to think the world was flat and the sun rose, so we still think our senses separate, our perceptions isolate and all distinct, 20/20, and at the edges where only the senses get fuzzy begins the dogma...