On a dry autumn evening, the setting sun catches in the needles of a limber pine, sets the tree glimmering as if with raindrops from a summer shower. Each droplet shines, its own glowing globe. Sage and rabbit brush burnish golden, and granite glistens. The land whispers, wind over rock, through grass soft at the end of the day, and, as I listen, I hear it say that this study of light is a study of more, that it will darken with the falling sun, that it will catch itself tomorrow against new leaves, on the other side of pines, dancing with transposed shadows. That the light that shimmers in those delicate points in the tree before me never evaporates but instead turns and returns and touches into beauty many things, many places, in the course of one rotation of the earth.