Sunday Times E-Paper

Dance in the sunlight

“Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance”(Lewis Carroll)

It’s morning. I step into the garden and breathe in, deeply. The sun has just cleared the horizon, lighting up the rooftops, slanting across the garden, bathing parts of it golden, leaving the rest in shadow. The trees and the ivy-covered wall are a perfect backdrop for the rays that fall into the air gap between them and me. It seems full of dust. Dust?

No. Insects. Flying around. So minute that they cannot be seen, but for the sunlight that makes them illuminated, animated motes.

I am amazed. I had not expected so much traffic! They are everywhere: rising from the ground, whizzing like motorcycles on the highway, shooting upwards and across, trundling along sedately like old ladies in little cars, weaving in and out like “tuk-tuks” in traffic. So many kinds of flying insects, none of them visible, but made so by the slanting rays and a dark backdrop. Each one doing its own thing.

The sun glints off the webs spun by little spiders during the night. In this chaotic traffic they are the hunters, laying in wait, like the beggars at the traffic lights.

So many! They are in the very air I breathe in. I must be inhaling them, unknowingly? Am I also a hunter, like the spider? But the spider has intent, and purpose. I have none.

The sun rises a notch higher. The scene changes.

Only the bigger specks are now visible. And it rises higher, light floods in, the backdrop cease to be that and, suddenly, all activity ceases.

Ceases? No. Becomes invisible. But they, the little animated specks, must still be there in the air I breathe in, living out their lives in their own way.

Unaware of the tricks that sunlight plays on them. To them, do we exist? Or are we just another bumbling form of life, like the whale going through a school of little fish which parts to let him through?

And to us, the whales, do they exist? I was given a sudden vision of their world. It’s another world. It may be not the one I live in. Or not? If I can see them only in a particular light, maybe there are others who I cannot see because I need other kinds of light, like infra red? Maybe another range of hearing, like how dogs can hear sounds outside our range?

But if they exist, and I cannot see or hear them, do they exist? Or do we all exist, but on different planes? All of us living side by side, unaware of each other?

Let me carry this thought further. If we co-exist on different visual planes, on audio planes (we do not hear the sounds of the cosmos), then, can we not coexist on temporal planes? Different beings living on different planes of Time. To a butterfly, our day is a lifetime. To some other being, our lifetime may be a day. But we live together, unaware of each other. Our worlds, or planes, sometimes touch each other and give us a momentary glimpse of another world?

Like the vision of insects dancing in the sunlight.

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2021-09-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://sundaytimes.pressreader.com/article/282527251584674

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