My Life in Red

Occasionally it happens. I am walking up the hill and turn a corner to confront the red azalea in bloom and I enter the world of color. The flowers are close and spaced in a way that gives a sense of depth and the air turn red. I walk back and move in again to the color feeling that my eyes have scraped the color out of the air and it has come to rest somewhere within me.
It can also be the green light through bamboo and I will stop to feel the cool liquid breeze, the moving waves of light, the whining of a thick bamboo stalk gnashing againt another, the sudden rustle of leaves chattering above me, and the smell of damp mud. The bamboo and green light I associate with treks up to the Espiritu Santo River, the Holy Ghost River, with two large dogs panting yards in front of me, but I have felt it walking down into the gully of a creek and instead of bamboo straining out all light exist for green, rain forest palms are doing it.
The sense of these moments and sensations can seldom be shared. You can note the green light and point it out, but then it somehow has been spoken and shared and is less real once it is in the world. It has moved from feeling to consensus.
The sense is fragile. If you focus too long on moving into the red, gathering it in with your eyes, you spoil the moment. It should remain brief. Later I can remember the feeling if not the moment of suddenly being in red.
I also find that much that fascinates me (horned spiders, a large red centipede dead in the mud, the buds of an orchid, counting time and remembering events such as deaths by the blooming of a flower, finding a twig is actually a bug) will only impose the burden of a polite response on someone else when I tell about it. Being there is everything and is momentary. Memory is our great comfort.