Such love does
the sky now pour
that wherever I stand
I have to wring out the light
when I get home.

– St. Francis of Assisi

That light exists is a profound wonder.
So, too is the fact that we can see it,
at the wavelengths
that create all the colors and shades in the world.
It boggles to think
that the human brain,
the most complex thing
in the known universe,
allocates a generous proportion of its circuits
to seven million microscopic cone cells
lodged in our retinas,
the size of a poppy seed,
doing the work so we can
make our way
by nothing more than starlight.
And what do you know?
We never actually see what our retinas see!
if we did, all images before us
would be a blur of light and dark pixels
jiggling deviously with every move of the gaze.
What we see instead
is a three-dimensional world
washed in a thousand shades of colors,
corrected for retinal imperfections,
mended at the blind spot,
stabilized for our eyes and head movements,
massively reinterpreted by the brain
from what it remembers
of similar visual scenes