Recommended soundtrack for reading:

Watch the world go by from a commuter train at sunset, and the grandeur of the earth and her creatures is inescapable. The trees are hedgehog quills against the reddened haze of the sky. Houses come and go like afterthoughts, and as the sky dims, the window lights are gateways into the neighborly interior of other people’s minds.

The deep purple slowly swallows the outer world. The train window becomes a mirror, reflecting the observer and the fellow stranger-companion commuters. The wooded universe outside becomes nothing more than the void that lives behind all mirrors as it is subsumed in the emptiness of night.

The observer is so small compared to the infinite expanse of river and soil and branch, and yet, in order to gain admittance, all things must pass before the Reflection. There is no thing that is not the observer. The observer is nothing and everything, a mirror against which the question of the universe may be posed.