Seeing the light

 Seeing the light


It is November 2022

in Massachusetts

in the United States of America


I sit on the patio at sunset

a glass of beer in hand


The light painting the sky

departed from the sun

eight minutes before

it touched my eyes

refracted by the atmosphere

so I am able to sit in the rainbow


Though no fault of my own

I am seeing the sun as it was

at an earlier time


I rub my right eye

and am looking through 

the scarred cornea of my left

as result of an injury

at age seven


Instantaneously I am hiding behind a bed

in a dormitory

at the boarding school

in Middleburg, South Africa

about 8,000 miles from here

in an orange peel slingshot battle

with my new friends


My brain traveled 70 years into the past

at 16,000 miles per second

more than 10,000 times slower

than the speed of light in a vacuum

to get me there


A half second later

I am in the vicinity of 

the Yucatán peninsula

65 million years ago

with the dinosaurs

which suddenly couldn't see the sun


A moment later I am

52,000,000 miles from here

kicking up red dust

on the Martian surface in 2035 CE

like the astronaut

in a popular movie


The human mind is a time machine

fueled by memory and imagination

and milk and fruit and vegetables


My head is quite big

my face disproportionately small

enabling my cranium to accommodate

a universal biological computer with 

massive parallel processing capability

a brain weighing about 3 pounds

utilizing about a fifth

of the energy my 170 pound body requires

just to get through a day


I look much like

all the other members of our species

on this planet

with brains a little less than 

14 billion years in the making

discounting the time 

before the last singularity


The current version is about

200,000 years old

with a couple of upgrades

more recently


I am pretty happy with it

How about you?


Aubrey Lieberman

11/22/22

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