Sunlight Filter Quotes

There is a relationship between the eye contacts we make and the perceptions that we create in our heads, a relationship between the sound of another's voice and the emotions that we feel in our hearts, a relationship between our movements in space all around us and the magnetic pulls we can create between others and ourselves. All of these things (and more) make up the magic of every ordinary day and if we are able to live in this magic, to feel and to dwell in it, we will find ourselves living with magic every day. These are the white spaces in life, the spaces in between the written lines, the cracks in which the sunlight filters into. Some of us swim in the overflowing of the wine glass of life, we stand and blink our eyes in the sunlight reaching unseen places, we know where to find the white spaces, we live in magic.

He softened, and it felt green. “I’ll be your hands.” “And I’ll be your sanity.” He leaned forward then. He kissed me. In our room, as cool winter sunlight filtered in through the window. It was sweet and warm, and I’d never wanted anything more.

Her essence infused everything—the sunlight filtering through the pines, the creek trickling beside us despite the cold. Even the wind seemed to dance. It swirled her scent around me, soothing my frazzled nerves like a balm.

The morning sunlight filters through my eyelids. It's a less than remarkable thought.

THERE are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte-Cécile send my thoughts wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o'clock that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where sunlight filtered through spring foliage, and Sylvia bent, half curiously, half tenderly, over a small, green lizard, murmuring, "To think that this also is a little ward of God?

The sunlight filtered through the trees, melting the thin layer of frost on the ground. He gripped the railing as the light stretched toward him. It touched his hands first. And then his wrists, and arms, and finally his face. It warmed him. It calmed him. He hoped wherever he was going that there’d still be the sun and the moon and the stars. He’d spent a majority of his life with his head turned down. It seemed only fair that eternity would allow him to raise his face toward the sky.

...you looked back at me... With transparent nonexpression, like rays of sunlight filtering through a forest swept with the cold winds of winter.…

Warm sunlight filtered in through the window. He smiled salt in the air. It felt like a lovely dream.

If Oak is the sunlight filtering through trees in the woods, all shifting gold and shadow, then Tiernan seems like those same woods in winter, the branches barren and cold.

My life is hard. No one would rob me of that. The clothes I am wearing came out of a knotted up black plastic trash bag from a resale shop downtown. And not the downtown where shiny cars wink at you in the sunlight. If a car winks at you in this area it’s being driven by a person you would be best to avoid. My side of downtown is crumbling and skirted by chain link fences. --Rocky Evans

The happiness will come slowly, the way light filters in through the window in the early morning hours. So slowly you don't even notice the night is ending, until you wake up and see the sunlight.

A dark clearing - one of her favorite places - spread cavernlike under five oaks so dense only hazy streams of sunlight filtered through the canopy, striking lush patches of trillium and white violets

As she rounded a corner one of her favourite songs came on the radio, and sunlight filtered through the trees the way it does with lace curtains, reminding her of her grandmother, and tears began to slide down her cheeks. Not for her grandmother, who was then still very much among the living, but because she felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. It overwhelmed her, made her pull the car to the side of the road. Afterwards she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it. Now, however, she knows she wasn’t being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It’s a rare gift to understand that your life is wondrous, and that it won’t last forever.

He speaks on, words washing over me, the way that sunlight skips over the surface of water and filters into the depths below, lighting up the darkness. I keep my eyes closed. Amazingly, I can still see the stars: whole galaxies blooming from nothing—pink and purple suns, vast silver oceans, a thousand white moons.

There's a certain feeling that can only be compared to the same feeling one gets when they've been in the cold rain when it's dark at night and suddenly night gives way to dawn and sunlight filters through the clouds as they part. That's how his voice felt as it hit my ears, flowing through me like fresh air hitting my lungs. It felt like I was slowly sinking into a hot bubble bath after having been outside, naked in the cold.

Why should the Mass of Sainte Cécile bend my thoughts wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o'clock that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Sylvia bent, half curiously, half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: "To think that this also is a little ward of God!

When a vase shatters and you try to put the broken pieces back together, they never fit again. Not perfectly. Not in the way they used to. There may be cracks in the new vase, but it’s thanks to those fissures that sunlight filters through.

Between the sleeping and the waking, it is there. Between the rising and the resting, it is there. It is always there. It gnaws on my heart. It chews on my soul. I turn aside and see it. I stop my ears and hear it. I cover myself and feel it. There are no human words for what I mean. It is the language of the bare bough and the cold stone, pronounced in the fell wind's sullen whisper and the metronomic drip-drip of the rain. It is the song the falling snow sings and the discordant clamour of sunlight ripped apart by the canopy and miserly filtered down. It is what the unseeing eye sees. It is what the deaf ear heres. It is the romantic ballad of death's embrace; the solemn hymn of offal dripping from bloody teeth; the lamentation of the bloated corpse rotting in the sun; the graceful ballet of maggots twisting in the ruins of God's temple. Here in this gray land, we have no name. We are the carcasses reflected in the yellow eye. Our bones are bleached within our skin; our empty sockets regard the crow. Here in this shadow country, our tiny voices scratch like a fly's wing against unmoving air. Ours is the language of imbeciles, the gibberish of idiots. The root and the vine have more to say than us.

The moon, our lonely sister, filters pain and harm from sunlight, and reflects it back to us safely, free of burn and blemish. We danced in moonlight on the balcony that night, Oleg and I, and we sang and shouted and laughed, hardening ourselves to what we’d done in life, and what we’d lost. And the moon graced two fallen fools, on a fallen day, with sunlight purified by a mirror in the sky, made of stone.

Some wild mustard seeds respond to changes in the angle and length of daylight through six feet of snowpack, while many forest species recognize the difference between full sunlight (a good chance to sprout), and the far-red wavelengths that filter through leaves (too shady). Whatever

When a vase shatters and you try to put the broken pieces back together, they never fit again. Not perfectly. Not in the way they used to. There may be cracks in the new vase, but it’s thanks to those fissures that sunlight filters through. Life thrives under its glow, grows through the cracks, and blooms anew.

Pike closed his eyes, and filled his lungs, then pushed with his diaphragm. He breathed deep again. Pranayamic breathing from the hatha yoga. Pike lost himself in a cool forest glade, dappled by sunlight filtered through lime green leaves. When he breathed, he smelled moss and sumac. His pulse slowed. He grew calm. He centered. Pike

Telling himself there was no harm in one kiss, Severly leaned and gently took her lips with his. As the warmth of his mouth held hers, the world stopped for Celia. Everything became part of this moment - the sunlight filtering in from the window behind them, the scent of tuberoses and lilies, all became part of this, her first kiss.

Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelope the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas—the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things will emerge and join and stand once again, this time perhaps to take a different and better course. I have seen the place called Trinity, in New Mexico, where our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb and the heat of the blast fused sand into a greenish glass—already the grass has returned, and the cactus and the mesquite.

Our physical living is held together by plant sacrifice. We eat, wear, and are sheltered by plants and plant material. Nearly all of our medicines are plant-derived. We need to take time with them, get to know them. It’s as one of the elders from a nearby pueblo told me once when she came to visit. She admired the two aloe vera plants who took up a large part of the living room as they basked in the sunlight filtered through the skylight. They loved her attention. ‘These are the knowledge bearers. They are the ones we need to be listening to, not your computer, your internet that is pulling you into a world that will never feed you, only make you hungrier,’ she told me. ~Joy Harjo, from Poet Warrior

Come to California...and bathe in fire red sunlight!

A vast and fiery nuclear furnace launched photons through the reaches of space; they hurtled trillions of kilometers at breakneck speed, then filtered gently into the bedroom as shafts of dawn sunlight.

In a valley shaded with rhododendrons, close to the snow line, where a stream milky with meltwater splashed and where doves and linnets flew among the immense pines, lay a cave, half, hidden by the crag above and the stiff heavy leaves that clustered below. The woods were full of sound: the stream between the rocks, the wind among the needles of the pine branches, the chitter of insects and the cries of small arboreal mammals, as well as the birdsong; and from time to time a stronger gust of wind would make one of the branches of a cedar or a fir move against another and groan like a cello. It was a place of brilliant sunlight, never undappled. Shafts of lemon-gold brilliance lanced down to the forest floor between bars and pools of brown-green shade; and the light was never still, never constant, because drifting mist would often float among the treetops, filtering all the sunlight to a pearly sheen and brushing every pine cone with moisture that glistened when the mist lifted. Sometimes the wetness in the clouds condensed into tiny drops half mist and half rain, which floated downward rather than fell, making a soft rustling patter among the millions of needles. There was a narrow path beside the stream, which led from a village-little more than a cluster of herdsmen's dwellings - at the foot of the valley to a half-ruined shrine near the glacier at its head, a place where faded silken flags streamed out in the Perpetual winds from the high mountains, and offerings of barley cakes and dried tea were placed by pious villagers. An odd effect of the light, the ice, and the vapor enveloped the head of the valley in perpetual rainbows.

It was a place of brilliant sunlight, never undappled. Shafts of lemon-gold brilliance lanced down to the forest floor between bars and pools of brown-green shade; and the light was never still, never constant, because drifting mist would often float among the treetops, filtering all the sunlight to a pearly sheen and brushing every pine cone with moisture that glistened when the mist lifted. Sometimes the wetness in the clouds condensed into tiny drops half mist and half rain, which floated downward rather than fell, making a soft rustling patter among the millions of needles. There was a narrow path beside the stream, which led from a village-little more than a cluster of herdsmen's dwellings - at the foot of the valley to a half-ruined shrine near the glacier at its head, a place where faded silken flags streamed out in the Perpetual winds from the high mountains, and offerings of barley cakes and dried tea were placed by pious villagers. An odd effect of the light, the ice, and the vapor enveloped the head of the valley in perpetual rainbows.

Evening had turned the sky a deep persimmon. The remaining sunlight enriched the colors of the ubiquitous flowers and foliage to even greater vibrancy, as if the saturation filter had been notched up several levels. Caleb noted all this in passing as he strode deliberately forward. He didn’t know how he was going to do this, only that he had to make the attempt.

I think of the view from a favorite arroyo in the late afternoon, the east slope still bathed in sunlight, the far slope already full of dark shade and lengthening shadows. A cool breeze, as one can look across the plains, out over miles of homes and trees, and hear the faraway hum of traffic on the high-ways and see the golden light filtering through the mist-laden air.

I sensed in it an absolute rest for the spirit, a beatifica- tion of the flesh. Summer, white clouds, the empty blue of the sky following the final lesson of the day, and the touch of nostalgic sadness tinging the glitter of sunlight filtering through the trees, induced a sense of intoxication. I existed.. . . How complex were the procedures necessary to attain this existence! Within it, a large number of concepts that for me were close to fetishes achieved direct association with my body and senses, quite independently of the agency of words. The army, physical training, summer, clouds, sunset, the green of summer grasses, the white training suit, sweat, muscle, and just the faintest whiff of death. . . . Nothing was lacking; every piece of the mosaic was in place. I had absolutely no need of any others, and thus no need of words. The world I was in was made up of conceptual elements that were as pure as angels; all foreign elements had been temporarily swept aside, and I overflowed with the infinite joy of being one with the world, a joy akin to that produced by cold water on skin warmed by the summer sun.

Chapter 3, The Dark Forest....The sound of flowing water echoed in the distance and then the path converged upon a creek full of fast, rippling, white water cascading over brown and red colored rocks. Moss dangled across the pathway and swung back and forth as the trespassers moved under the green vegetation. Bright yellow fingers of sunlight attempted to filter through the dense tundra to touch the moist earth until finally, the appendages of light disappeared completely. “Come children, this way,” called Mrs. Beetle leading her group over a moldy, moss-laden, wood bridge.

I go into the high-ceilinged stacks and wander among the shelves, searching for a book that looks interesting. Magnificent thick beams run across the ceiling of the room, and gentle early-summer sunlight is shining through the open window, the chatter of birds in the garden filtering in. The books in the shelves in front of me, sure enough, are just like Oshima said, mainly books of Japanese poetry. Tanka and haiku, essays on poetry, biographies of various poets. There are also a lot of books on local history. A shelf farther back contains general humanities―collections of Japanese literature, world literature, and individual writers, classics, philosophy, drama, art history, sociology, history, biography, geography.... When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages―a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.

To pass the time, Pat studied the photographs in Bill’s office. In a log frame on the wall behind the desk was a poster-sized photograph of a two-story cabin illuminated by filtered rays of golden sunlight.

I sat at my desk, poured myself a glass of wine, and pondered life...my profession...was it meaningless? I took a long, drawn-back swig of the bourbon and slammed down the glass. I only then noticed the stream of filtered light illuminating through the window, through the partially drawn shades. It was beautiful. I thought to myself, "I am a critic. My life is criticizing the works of others, the joys of others, the very essence of what others have toiled, agonized and gone mad over. "I am a critic. I write in a magazine about how I don't like what someone else likes, merely because they wrote it." Write what you love, they always say. "I am a hater," I said, pondering the beautiful sunlight and my glass of alcohol, "...but I hate for the enjoyment of others.

The light filtered through the trees, rays of sunlight splitting around the vast trunks, the branches above us fluttering in a faint wind, and the green needles of Douglas Firs shimmering silver underneath in the breeze.

Morning sunlight filtered through my bedroom window.

Kaleidoscope Yoga: The universal heart and the individual self. We, as humanity, make up together a mosaic of beautiful colors and shapes that can harmoniously play together in endless combinations. We are an ever-changing play of shape and form. A kaleidoscope consists of a tube (or container), mirrors, pieces of glass (or beads or precious stones), sunlight, and someone to turn it and observe and enjoy the forms. Metaphorically, perhaps the sun represents the divine light, or spark of life, within all of us. The mirrors represent our ability to serve as mirrors for one another and each other’s alignment, reflecting sides of ourselves that we may not have been aware of. The tube (or container) is the practice of community yoga. We, as human beings, are the glass, the beads, the precious stones. The facilitator is the person turning the Kaleidoscope, initiating the changing patterns. And the resulting beauty of the shapes? Well, that’s for everyone to enjoy... Coming into a practice and an energy field of community yoga over and over, is a practice of returning, again and again, to the present moment, to the person in front of you, to the people around you, to your body, to others’ bodies, to your energy, to others’ energy, to your breath, to others’ breath. [...] community yoga practice can help us, in a very real, practical, grounded, felt, somatic way, to identify and be in harmony with all that is around us, which includes all of our fellow human beings.
 We are all multiple selves. We are all infinite. We are all universal selves. We are all unique expressions of the universal heart and universal energy. We are all the universal self. We are all one another. And we are all also unique specific individuals. And to the extent that we practice this, somatically, we become more and more comfortable and fluid with this larger, more cosmic, more inter-related reality. We see and feel and breathe ourselves, more and more, as the open movement of energy, as open somatic possibility. As energy and breath. This is one of the many benefits of a community yoga practice. Kaleidoscope shows us, in a very practical way, how to allow universal patterns of wisdom and interconnectedness to filter through us. [...] One of the most interesting paradoxes I have encountered during my involvement with the community yoga project (and it is one that I have felt again and again, too many times to count) is the paradox that many of the most infinite, universal forms have come to me in a place of absolute solitude, silence, deep aloneness or meditation. And, similarly, conversely and complimentarily, (best not to get stuck on the words) I have often found myself in the midst of a huge crowd or group of people of seamlessly flowing forms, and felt simultaneously, in addition to the group energy, the group shape, and the group awareness, myself as a very cleanly and clearly defined, very particular, individual self. These moments and discoveries and journeys of group awareness, in addition to the sense of cosmic expansion, have also clarified more strongly my sense of a very specific, rooted, personal self. The more deeply I dive into the universal heart, the more clearly I see my own place in it. And the more deeply I tune in and connect with my own true personal self, the more open and available I am to a larger, more universal self. We are both, universal heart and universal self. Individual heart and individual self. We are, or have the capacity for, or however you choose to put it, simultaneous layers of awareness. Learning to feel and navigate and mediate between these different kinds and layers of awareness is one of the great joys of Kaleidoscope Community Yoga, and of life in general. Come join us, and see what that feels like, in your body, again and again. From the Preface of Kaleidoscope Community Yoga: The Art of Connecting: The First 108 Poses

He dived under and let the cool water soothe his throbbing wings and raise them off his back. He glided in a lazy circle around Bumblewind, who was not a fast swimmer. Morningleaf paddled above them, her wings extended and her neck flat, the sunlight filtering through her aqua feathers casting stripes of color across the water. Star floated over the tops of the lake plants.

But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves.

The air was pure and still, and early sunshine sparkled on the heavy dew. In the valley sat cotton candy mist, and the distant hills stood softly, their edges blurred and colors muted by the moist air. Swallows and house martins swooped and dipped, hungry for their breakfasts, catching the first rise of insects of the day. The honeysuckle and roses had not yet warmed to release their scent, so the strongest smell was of wet grass and bracken. Laura smiled, breathing deeply, and walked lightly through the gate into the meadows. She hadn't the courage to head off onto the mountain on her own just yet but could not wait to explore the woods at the end of the fields. By the time she reached the first towering oaks, her feet were washed clean by the dew. She felt wonderfully refreshed and awake. As she wandered among the trees she had the sense of a place where time had stood still. Where man had left only a light footprint. Here were trees older than memory. Trees that had sheltered farmers and walkers for generations. Trees that had been meeting points for lovers and horse dealers. Trees that had provided fuel and food for families and for creatures of the forest with equal grace. As she walked deeper into the woods she noticed the quality of sound around her change. Gone were the open vistas and echoes of the meadows and their mountain backdrop. Here even the tiniest noises were close up, bouncing back off the trunks and branches, kept in by the dense foliage. The colors altered subtly, too. With the trees in full leaf the sunlight was filtered through bright green, giving a curious tinge to the woodland below. White wood anemones were not white at all, but the palest shade of Naples yellow. The silver lichens which grew in abundance bore a hint of olive. Even the miniature violets reflected a suggestion of viridian.

My hands tightened into fists in an attempt to steel my resolve. She could not see that I mirrored her pain, like a broken mirror, the cracks filtering out, breaking, shalttering. There went another future. Lost. Would I ever break free of this prison? Would the heavy mists ever shed to revesl sunlight again?

The happiness will come slowly, the way light filters in through the window in the early morning hours. So slowly you don’t even notice the night is ending, until you wake up and see the sunlight.

Alas, when she opened her mouth to thank him, her composure deserted her completely and all she could manage was a low, distraught plea. “You must stop doing this!” she said desperately. It was not the response Kesgrave anticipated. Oh, no. Having been impressed by Bea’s pluck and daring from the very first, even while her refusal to abide by his authority drove him mad with frustration, he’d never imagined that the presentation of a simple band could have such a disastrous effect on her self-possession. Kesgrave’s confusion, so readily apparent in the way he drew his eyebrows together and pursed his lips, helped relieve some of Bea’s distress. After two decades of falling short of her aunt’s unreasonable expectations, it was still revelatory to exceed his. Taken aback by her discomfort, Kesgrave immediately complied with her request, promising never to repeat the event. “I could not even if I desired to,” he assured her, “for the bracelet is the only item of your mother’s in need of reclaiming.” It was perfect, Bea thought, the characteristic pedantry of his reply, and under ordinary circumstances, it would have elicited from her a fond mocking rejoinder. But everything about the moment felt remarkable, even the sunlight filtering through the window, bathing them in a golden glow, and she answered instead with terrifying honesty. “You must stop making me love you more, Damien. The feeling is already so overwhelming, I can scarcely breathe.” His features remained steady but his eyes—oh, yes, his eyes—blazed with emotion and he raised his hand as if to touch her. Mindful of their situation, however, he let it drop before he made contact, and his lips curved slightly as he shook his head to deny her request. “I fear I cannot, Bea, no. Your brief spells of breathlessness are the only advantage I have in this relationship, and I am not prepared to relinquish it.” The duke spoke softly, emphatically, and Bea waited for amusement to enter his eyes, for she knew he was teasing, but his expression remained fervent. Warmed by his gaze, she longed to move closer, to draw his lips to hers, and it was only the presence of her family that kept her firmly rooted to the spot.

A thrush had alighted on a bough not five meters away, almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in the shade. It spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston and Julia clung together, fascinated. The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity. Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song. Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness? ... But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt.

The subject for both of them was the light, but for Constable the light was through the clouds, it had a kind of filter quality. [For] Turner it was the sunlight, pure and simple. The sun, absolutely. He's supposed to have said on his deathbed that the sun is God—that's not what he said. He said, 'I'd love to see the sun again.' That's what he said, and wouldn't we all.

But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt.

It was morning. Sunlight filtered in with the smell of burnt toast.

Dreaming Of Hair" Ivy ties the cellar door in autumn, in summer morning glory wraps the ribs of a mouse. Love binds me to the one whose hair I've found in my mouth, whose sleeping head I kiss, wondering is it death? beauty? this dark star spreading in every direction from the crown of her head. My love's hair is autumn hair, there the sun ripens. My fingers harvest the dark vegtable of her body. In the morning I remove it from my tongue and sleep again. Hair spills through my dream, sprouts from my stomach, thickens my heart, and tangles from the brain. Hair ties the tongue dumb. Hair ascends the tree of my childhood--the willow I climbed one bare foot and hand at a time, feeling the knuckles of the gnarled tree, hearing my father plead from his window, _Don't fall!_ In my dream I fly past summers and moths, to the thistle caught in my mother's hair, the purple one I touched and bled for, to myself at three, sleeping beside her, waking with her hair in my mouth. Along a slippery twine of her black hair my mother ties ko-tze knots for me: fish and lion heads, chrysanthemum buds, the heads of Chinamen, black-haired and frowning. Li-En, my brother, frowns when he sleeps. I push back his hair, stroke his brow. His hairline is our father's, three peaks pointing down. What sprouts from the body and touches the body? What filters sunlight and drinks moonlight? Where have I misplaced my heart? What stops wheels and great machines? What tangles in the bough and snaps the loom? Out of the grave my father's hair bursts. A strand pierces my left sole, shoots up bone, past ribs, to the broken heart it stiches, then down, swirling in the stomach, in the groin, and down, through the right foot. What binds me to this earth? What remembers the dead and grows towards them? I'm tired of thinking. I long to taste the world with a kiss. I long to fly into hair with kisses and weeping, remembering an afternoon when, kissing my sleeping father, I saw for the first time behind the thick swirl of his black hair, the mole of wisdom, a lone planet spinning slowly. Sometimes my love is melancholy and I hold her head in my hands. Sometimes I recall our hair grows after death. Then, I must grab handfuls of her hair, and, I tell you, there are apples, walnuts, ships sailing, ships docking, and men taking off their boots, their hearts breaking, not knowing which they love more, the water, or their women's hair, sprouting from the head, rushing toward the feet.

Ballymartle was another crossroads village. In the drizzle, it looked to me like a miserable place, but it had one thing that lifted my spirits: it had a railway station. We found a bench in a dilapidated shelter and sat down to wait for a train. Sunlight filtered through the drizzle and flooded the scene. Stretching as far as we could see on all sides were pale birch trees glistening, misshapen and tall, like thin, grey giants frozen in a hundred-year argument. For the first time since we landed on the beach, I began to relax. I closed my eyes. A voice called out after a while, and I opened my eyes. A man stood in a field beyond the opposite platform. I waved to him. “When’s the next train?” The man lifted his cap and scratched his head. “You could be in for a bit of a wait. The last one went through here ten years ago.

When one is in the woods, on a day like this, one feels altogether connected again to the very fabric of the world. The green, calming canopy of branches and leaves overhead lets sunlight trickle through from above in just the right dose, and the breeze is filtered through miles and miles of trees and bush and carries the scent of every flowering dogwood and every freshwater spring and pond, mingling with every lake and river and stream and every good creature that walks through the halls of the forest. In the woods, one senses there is no evil, no greed, no tyrant, no oppressor, no malady, but indeed a deep wellspring of meaning returns. To be connected to the woods is to be connected to the very art of life itself, and to walk along the stones and mosses, and under the tall trees and over the fallen trees and alongside the wet, rotten stumps is to be reminded of the great circus mystery and magic of being itself.

Sunlight filtering through the wood-framed windows has a quiet prairie confidence. Juliette rouses slowly. She is comfortable and calm, hovering between sleep and wakefulness. A distant, unpleasant thought – just beyond the reach of her mind. Peace. Whatever else there is, it can wait. This is more important.

The bird hopped till it reached the very end of the ray of sunlight filtering through the veranda's leaves. It was happy that no human beings dwelt in the ancient old home, so it could bathe in its favorite sunshine all day long.

He sat beside Molly in filtered sunlight on the rim of a dry concrete fountain, letting the endless stream of faces recapitulate the stages of his life.

Warm sunlight filtered in through the window. He smelled salt in the air. It felt like a lovely dream.

The biggest photo in the center of the page was of a gorgeous blond dog named Hudson who was posed with a smile and an irresistible head tilt. He looked like a Disney character brought to life, complete with a starry-eyed expression and a filtered halo of sunlight around his head. At first glance she thought he was pure yellow Lab, but the dark muzzle and oversized ears suggested that there was something houndy mixed in his DNA.

Filtered sunlight streamed through the curtains, shooting through my eyes and into the back of my skull. Groaning, I slammed them shut, feeling my brain splinter in half. Damn palinka. Though, it was more than my head throwing a tantrum. Inhaling through the agony, my muscles screamed and spasmed. In training, it was always the second or third day when your body really responded to a brutal workout. There were days I struggled to even sit on the toilet and pee. Today my body

else.’7 What we believe about the world and how we interact with it will very much depend on the worldview that we adopt. When I put my contact lenses in my eyes every morning, suddenly the blurry outlines of my house become clear and distinct. If I then put on a pair of sunglasses as I step outside into bright sunlight, my view of the world will change again. Inhabiting a Christian, atheist or other religious worldview is somewhat like putting on a pair of glasses that changes our focus. The worldview different people adopt might just as easily be an unexamined Western consumerism or strongly held political ideology. Whatever our worldview may be, none of us have unimpeded 20/20 vision when it comes to the true picture of reality. Our assumptions, beliefs and values act as a filter through which we interpret and engage the world around us. In the Christian worldview, intellectual arguments and evidence may help us to establish the fact that God exists and has been revealed in Jesus Christ. But the real task of faith is coming to see the whole world through Christ-focused spectacles.

Then I saw her—Lars’s guest—the one they called Faith. I wouldn’t have missed her. She still had patches of her human karma clinging to her new form. It was as if the brightest sunlight I’d ever seen was filtering through the leaves of a tree while she sat under it on a spring day. I’d never seen anything like it.

NEXT TIME LEW got up into the embattled altitudes of the San Juans, he noticed out on the trail that besides the usual strikebreaking vigilantes there were now cavalry units of the Colorado National Guard, in uniform, out ranging the slopes and creeksides. He had thought to obtain, through one of the least trustworthy of his contacts in the Mine Owners Association, a safe-passage document, which he kept in a leather billfold along with his detective licenses. More than once he ran into ragged groups of miners, some with deeply bruised or swelling faces, coatless, hatless, shoeless, being herded toward some borderline by mounted troopers. Or the Captain said some borderline. Lew wondered what he should be doing. This was wrong in so many ways, and bombings might help but would not begin to fix it. It wasn’t long before one day he found himself surrounded—one minute aspen-filtered shadows, the next a band of Ku Klux Klan night-riders, and here it was still daytime. Seeing these sheet-sporting vigilantes out in the sunlight, their attire displaying all sorts of laundering deficiencies, including cigar burns, food spills, piss blotches, and shit streaks, Lew found, you’d say, a certain de-emphasis of the sinister, pointy hoods or not. “Howdy, fellers!” he called out, friendly enough. “Don’t look like no nigger,” commented one. “Too tall for a miner,” said another. “Heeled, too. Think I saw him on a poster someplace.” “What do we do? Shoot him? Hang him?” “Nail his dick to a stump, and, and then, set him on fahr,” eagerly accompanied by a quantity of drool visibly soaking the speaker’s hood. “You all are doing a fine job of security here,” Lew beamed, riding through them easy as a herd of sheep, “and I’ll be sure to pass that along to Buck Wells when next I see him.” The name of the mine manager and cavalry commander at Telluride worked its magic. “Don’t forget my name!” hollered the drooler, “Clovis Yutts!” “Shh! Clovis, you hamhead, you ain’t supposed to tell em your name.” What in Creation could be going on up here, Lew couldn’t figure. He had a distinct, sleep-wrecking impression that he ought to just be getting his backside to the trackside, head on down to Denver, and not come up here again till it was all over. Whatever it was. It sure ‘s hell looked like war, and that must be what was keeping him here, he calculated, that possibility. Something like wanting to find out which side he was on without all these doubts. . . .

Sunlight filtered through the small

Humankind’s insuppressible exuberance demands that we spring forward clicking our heels in revelry and delight when basking in the fullness of the miracle of life. Every day is a delightful gift. Walking in the dappled valley spackled in filtered sunlight of verdant woodland, we witness the diffused silhouette of humankind’s ambitious gestalt to make known the indeterminate, unravel the indecipherable, and joyfully flaunt the magical experience of living in the moment free of angst.

The moon, our lonely sister, filters pain and harm from sunlight, and reflects it back to us safely, free of burn and blemish.

from the robust thirty of the year before. The spacious classroom on the second floor of Boston’s towering new Masonic temple, with busts of Plato, Socrates, Shakespeare, and Walter Scott arrayed in its four corners, was beginning to look empty in the weak winter sunlight that filtered through its single enormous Palladian window. The disaster that Elizabeth Peabody predicted hit fast. After volume two of Conversations appeared in February, “Pope” Andrews Norton blasted it as “one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene,” and assailed its author as “an ignorant and presuming charlatan,” either “insane or half-witted.” The book was “more indecent and obscene,” a second reviewer charged, “than any other we ever saw exposed for sale on a bookseller’s counter.

It was a last-year’s-generation parrot-cat, a hyacinth-blue puffball on sim-yellow paws rimmed round the edges with brownish stains. It had a matching tuxedo ruff and goatee and piercing golden eyes that caught and concentrated the filtered sunlight.

everything was lit by pearly sunlight filtering through the high windows, like the woods at twilight.

Nostalgia welled up inside me as my senses tingled at the thought of sunlight filtering through a luscious green forest, a soft warmth, and a type of freedom in the air I had never felt.

A burst of laughter was trapped in the sunlight that filtered through the closed window to dance on the sunrays with the dust motes.

I keep a begonia plant in my office, on my desk by the window. It’s thriving in that spot, right beside the bright light that filters in through the blue curtain in the afternoon. I have learned to care for begonias because I have killed a few in my time, and every time it is painful to admit that I could not keep them alive and well. When this begonia plant flourishes, I am full of hope. But still, sometimes I notice that they are thirsty. I pour water from my own drinking glass into the plastic container beneath the pot, so their roots can drink first. Within seconds, the water disappears, and I say to myself, “Oh, you were so thirsty.” They keep drinking and blooming and asking for more care in that most gentle way plants do, and I say that I am sorry when they are too thirsty or too drenched in sunlight. And I wonder how thirsty we are, or if we notice, if that mindfulness and way of keeping watch happens in our own souls. I wonder if we let others know when we need a drink or a break from the heat, or that we might need a little deadheading here or there. And when we get closer to the water, we drink it up within seconds, begging for more, while nearby someone says, “Oh, Love, you were so thirsty.” I wonder if we even notice that we’re thirsty.

Sunlight filtered through the glass panes from the waters above, waking the feathery tube worms clustered around the room. They burst into bloom, daubing the walls yellow, cobalt blue, and magenta. The golden rays warmed fronds of seaweed anchored to the floor. They shimmered in the glass of a tall gilt mirror and glinted off the polished coral walls. A