Blue Shift

There is a point at night when the moon and stars are out that all color is leached away and everything has a bluish tint. It's called the blue shift. The rods and cones in our eyes perceive light and color in different ways depending on the type of available light. At night, blue is predominant except where flood and household lights approach the brightness and spectrum of sunlight.

Right now with the faintest hint of blue in the night sky before the sun stretches its fiery light toward the horizon and the sky is that deep midnight blue, the porch light across the street is an oblong hole in the darkness where the yellow and brown of the door is clear. The three yellow eyes of the house across the street are visible, as is a star burst of yellow of the porch light down the street. The street lamp at the corner pushes the darkness back with a sweep of amber and a fox flits by in pursuit of squirrels and other rodents and the landlady is banging doors downstairs. The faint rumble of a diesel truck passing by is the only sound outside my windows and the space heater's rushing hum keeps me company in the dark with only the laptop screen for light.

It's quiet and peaceful here this morning and I feel as if I've wakened from a nightmare. I did have a nightmare that woke me two hours earlier, a definite change from the erotic theme of the past couple of weeks. Scenes of blood, the sounds of automatic fire, the sight of blood and a house and area I have visited frequently in my dreams combined to keep me prisoner, unable to stop the bloodshed and the pain. I don't know what catapulted me out of the dream but I was unable to fall back to sleep again and so I am up writing, reading emails and journals and eating cantaloupe in the darkness.

Times like this when I lived at the cabin were usually full moon nights when the blue shift of moonlight on snow was an ethereal call to go walking. Stories of fairies and the possibility of shifting from one reality to the next only to find on returning I had been gone years kept me close to the house and on well traveled ground. I shift from reality to reality too easily when I'm asleep to seek the shift when I'm fully awake. I know the consequences and I know the perils and I'm not ready to venture there yet. I have far too much to do, so much to keep me anchored here that I'll save walking through the blue shift into that other reality when I have finishing sucking the marrow of this life and this existence. There is still so much to learn and so much more to do before I walk off into the blue shift under a food moon beaming down onto the silent snowy ground where foxes flit past pursuing squirrels and other rodents and owls call greetings from shadowed pines above sleeping elk and deer and bear. Someday, but not today.