The past couple of days my granddaughter has been under the weather.  She’s been snuggled up on the couch with her DVD player and a blanket.

Observing her squinting, in an effort to shut the streaming sunbeam out of her eyes from the skylight, it brought me back to my own childhood memories of being sprawled out on a blanket on Old South Cape Beach decades long past.

The sun was a hypnotic orb.  I was constantly being told not to look at.  Don’t look at the sun, you’ll go blind!, screamed my parents.  I looked anyway.  I was that kind of a kid.

Looking at the sun had incredible advantages.  I would start by making my eyes tiny slits, and then gradually, ever so slowly, work up to a full direct megaton millisecond confrontation.  For twenty minutes I would look around the beach and see black orbs everywhere.  You see I was a scientist in the making.  Personal experimentation.  Logging my results.  I was going to be the first person on the planet who could make direct eye contact with the sun and keep my sight.

That huge ball of yellow-white power just hanging above my head, taunting me “to look”; to take in its energy from 93,000,000 miles away.  As the heat and light reached my insignificant cellular being,  I challenged it to infuse me with strength and inner light.

When I bored of the black orbs, and knowing logically that I could not make a steady diet of burning my retinas, I would lie down on the hot sand and squeeze my eyes as tight as I could.

LSD I scoff at you.  I could make any colour appear just by loosening my clamped shut-tight eyes.  I could see all the colours behind my eyelids, and with every colour revealed a variety of geometric shapes outlined in white.  It was glorious this gift of producing my own light show in my head.  There I was, starting out with darkness, and by simply doing eye crunches, not unlike an exercise for the abdomen, a full out artistic process, sans paintbrush, was created for my entertainment.

Looking at my granddaughter I wondered if I could still trick the light fantastic.  Standing face forward, until the sunbeam caressed my face, I began to tightly squeeze my eyes, loosen them, and re-crunch my lids.  There it all was.   Prismatic colours, and enhanced images danced and played inside of my mind.

The light is without and within and darkness was nowhere to be found for the moment.

Tags: artistic process, looking at the sun, LSD, megaton, ninety-three million, Old South Cape Beach, rainbows, squinting, sunbeam