A summer afternoon, for instance: light dimmed by its passage under the roof of a porch, then admitted to the room through a curtained window. Those who live in the house can't be seen from this angle, but for the present fraction of a second they're all alive. Don't worry. Shadows of green-leaved branches move to assure you that this light suspended in warm air isn't just a picture.
The picture itself is just out of camera range. It is a picture of people known to have lived here, and it's nailed to a wall where it seemed meant to be. We know that because just on the other side of the wall there was nothing but green leaf and moving shadow. That was where somebody set down a tripod and uncapped a lens.
But when mind's lens opens, it opens in this room, among unpredicted little adjustments of the light as a breeze moves the leaves and flows past them through the windows. Here, inside, the light is in motion. All that it falls on as it moves is becoming what was. It is what the lens will have failed to register as it stilled the shade.
