Celestial Presence

Cyclical Light (sunlight, starlight depictions)
Where I live, in Northern Idaho, at 48.2766° North by 116.5535 West, the sun is always at an angle and from the forest floor its rays filter through a thick veil of towering old firs, spruce, pine, larch, hemlock, cedars and a dappling of paper birch and quaking aspen. The morning light, impish, trips down a distant path, then abandons all around into cool shadowed puddles, returning to embrace a poignant vignette with golden beams of warming, afternoon rays. Helios arrives in narrow tendrils over the Selkirk Mountains, shifts with various personalities through out the day and then makes a last heraldic retreat beyond the Monarchs. With its leave there descends a darkness, so deep and final, that your hand remains invisible no matter how close you might hold it to your face. Oh, but on clear nights, the soul is treated to a mystical journey of celestial illumination, that pours down at first from a lantern-like moon, or gleams from a purpled crescent, slipping into a rhapsody of shimmering galaxies that dust the wild and pristine with silvered star shine and then subsides once again into an inky black spill.