Intuition Conquers
September 15,2005
Outside my apartment window there's a bee hive in a hollow section of the roof. All day long the bees flash back and forth in the sunlight doing their work. Every morning when I rise I go to this window in the hope of seeing an owl whom I suspect is living in the barn out back. Every morning I notice a knot of bees scrunched together in a small space on the window screen.
At the back of the house there's a generous yard with a stone wall and an enormous rotting stump of a weeping willow tree which came down with a dull thud in the middle of the night during a windy storm several years ago---luckily to no one's disadvantage. Beyond the yard a dilapitated barn on a high brick foundation. Next to the barn a tree growing on a tilt which has benefitted mightily from the demise of the willow and its gift of new sunlight.Beyond barn and tree, a sliver of land-locked woods perhaps three hundred feet wide and, beyond that, the rear of a house which fronts on the next street.
You would think that all these obstacles would prevent the low,rising sun from reaching my window...but they do not. There it is, at first light, a pencil thin line of brilliant yellow sunlight reflected from the narrow brass barrel of a floor lamp onto the pale eggshell wallpaper of the room and entering at the window in precisely the spot where the knot of bees are gathered on the screen. For ten or fifteen minutes this line of brilliant light windens and gradually pales but it's enough to warm the bodies of the bees so that they can fly away. How the sunlight finds it's way through and around so many obstacles and how the bees know that it will arrive is a mystery but there it is nonetheless. Intuition conquers.
Outside my apartment window there's a bee hive in a hollow section of the roof. All day long the bees flash back and forth in the sunlight doing their work. Every morning when I rise I go to this window in the hope of seeing an owl whom I suspect is living in the barn out back. Every morning I notice a knot of bees scrunched together in a small space on the window screen.
At the back of the house there's a generous yard with a stone wall and an enormous rotting stump of a weeping willow tree which came down with a dull thud in the middle of the night during a windy storm several years ago---luckily to no one's disadvantage. Beyond the yard a dilapitated barn on a high brick foundation. Next to the barn a tree growing on a tilt which has benefitted mightily from the demise of the willow and its gift of new sunlight.Beyond barn and tree, a sliver of land-locked woods perhaps three hundred feet wide and, beyond that, the rear of a house which fronts on the next street.
You would think that all these obstacles would prevent the low,rising sun from reaching my window...but they do not. There it is, at first light, a pencil thin line of brilliant yellow sunlight reflected from the narrow brass barrel of a floor lamp onto the pale eggshell wallpaper of the room and entering at the window in precisely the spot where the knot of bees are gathered on the screen. For ten or fifteen minutes this line of brilliant light windens and gradually pales but it's enough to warm the bodies of the bees so that they can fly away. How the sunlight finds it's way through and around so many obstacles and how the bees know that it will arrive is a mystery but there it is nonetheless. Intuition conquers.
posted by nagg at 8:03 PM
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