Says the announcer ahead of the evening news:

“the images you are about to see may be distressing”

This would not be me. In a broad range of dialects, groups of speakers form, perhaps choosing a spokesperson who becomes a communicator. No one group, and not even myself, comprises my audience.

Also, the sense of this adapted preamble will change, depending on the order in which the elements are considered. Good and bad, typically taken to be mutually exclusive, may blend.

Peeping out from beneath a slit in the venetian blind, a light hearted touch . . .

Here comes my friend the humming bird, tagging along on a trip to the compost. Any question of sanity? It's OK to do. Or not to do. In this afternoon wind there is no anchor quite like the tree beside the power pole. Robin is about to appear. I hear his chirp, a message and a preamble rolled into one. Considering, even before there was a seed feeder back here by the fence, that robin has watched over us. In earlier years there were his visits to the jasmine vine over the front porch, chirping there in a mystery of particulars.

The preamble above is now to be temporarily replaced. Now a skipping stone is sent skittering over the fluid surface, reaching the other shore, lofted by robin's song.

Heard without ears comes a rustling of leaves, weaving a story moving from the hidden mind of memories that cannot be told. Of planting petunias in early spring. At Stone Henge, builders celebrated this, untroubled by the hum of a refrigerator.

Like a grape vine winding back through its trellis, the preamble resumes, free of dialects.

Numerous ceremonies, public and private, will busy the mind. Not so engaged are a rock or a waterfall or a bird sitting on a branch. Being like these is simple. Stub my toe is not a ceremony. There is no doubt of it, no dispute. Are these theoretical considerations?

They are not ceremonies. There is nothing to get by them, or to celebrate. Except perhaps a new turn of mind. The mind that is not scattering integrates. Thus lessening its load, it might tend to a certain playfulness.

Let's say, backpedaling a bit, that it's lightened. Oh, enlightenment! Stories have been told of those who experience this in a flash of blinding light. Word play mingles with reality.

Where in the mind is the light so often experienced at sunrise? A transition out of darkness, from dreams in their vivid realm, is translated into something quite as insubstantial. Then have we stored photons? Or are they ceremonies, kept as scientific artifacts?