I was walking through a forest at night when I crossed paths with a firefly. When it switched itself on I was right on top of it, and I saw with abrupt and blazing clarity the horseshoe of lightning around its lower abdomen, the veins along its wings, the dangling wires of its legs. On a whim, I turned my flashlight off. For a second everything was black except the treetops silhouetted against the smokey night sky. As my eyes adjusted, I saw the forest was teeming with fireflies, and each of their slow pulses revealed small sections of the world behind the world of darkness. A patch of gravel here. A bed of pine needles there. A semi-circle of tree trunk. The textured asphalt that had led me here from the camp site.

This is how we live. Not in sunlight but in a vast darkness lit by fireflies. When we stand in broad daylight, we believe that everything we see is everything that exists. But how often do we see the truths that lie beneath---only in brief flashes of inspiration, in patches of vision that quickly dim. Our reality... consciousness... knowledge... experience... is a constellation of fireflies glowing in a night of ignorance.

And the fireflies glow all the more beautiful for it.


-------,edited----

I was walking through a forest at night when I crossed paths with a firefly. When it switched itself on I was right on top of it, and I saw with abrupt and blazing clarity the horseshoe of lightning around its lower abdomen, the veins along its wings, the dangling wires of its legs. On a whim, I turned my flashlight off. For a second everything was black, but as my eyes adjusted I saw the forest was teeming with fireflies.  Each of their slow pulses revealed small sections of the world behind the world of darkness. A patch of gravel here. A bed of pine needles there. A semi-circle of tree trunk. The textured asphalt that had led me here from the camp site.

This is how we live. Not in sunlight but in a vast darkness lit by fireflies. In broad daylight, we believe too easily that everything we see is everything that exists. But how often do we glimpse the truths that lie beneath?  Only in brief flashes of inspiration, in patches of vision that quickly dim.  Our reality... consciousness... knowledge... experience... is a constellation of fireflies glowing in a night of ignorance.

And the fireflies glow all the more beautiful for it.