Photo/Text 10: Shadows

When the low-hanging winter sun paints us gold and persimmon hues with its lukewarm laving, I look not so much at things as at their stretched taffy shadows. Reading them like tea leaves, it is not the future nor the past that I seek, because I am imbued always in these other times, in these not-nows; they are like cataracts upon my eyes, the future and the past, clouding my vision. So what I read in the shadows is something much more fleeting and inscrutable, something that eludes my gaze: the slippery present, not distorted but rather enhanced as shadow, the clarity jarring and pure, showing me the outlines of the desert, of where I am and who I am today, right now, this moment. Distilled into shadow, I stand and look upon myself at the setting of another year.