Dear Reader

For Danielle: I created Sunlight for you most of all.

I am so glad you’re here! I’ve created the most beautiful story I could, the most amazing, alluring world. I can hear you asking for the catch, because there’s always a catch, isn’t there? Fiction is conflict, is pain, hopefully with redemption, or at least a bit of understanding or possibility. Yes, I’m afraid there is a catch, but try not to let it trouble you. For now, please, come closer to see what I’ve made for you, for me, for all of us.

There are over five dozen birds speaking to each other in the trees that line my porch. I’ve invited them all, along with the grunting, chirping squirrels and the raccoons I never see during the day, but whose prints I witness in the snow, and the feral black-and-white cat watching me warily from behind the gnarled leafless tree with twisting spines. She sniffs the top of a strawberry I’ve left as an offering, as sustenance for all my friends, big and small, mammal, bird, bug. I give freely all my scraps and more. I go back inside and open a can of food meant for my fat orange-and-white cat, take it outside, dump it gently on a mound of ice for my feral friend, hoping she won’t come back in spring and beat up my old tabby cat, who’s not much of a fighter.

Have you ever listened to Reiki music? Indian flute music? Japanese koto? Celtic instrumentals? Burundi drum music? There is much that blends the human soul with its flora and fauna kin, with the elements themselves. Find something you like now. If you’re in the mood for nature noises minus human touch, a nice track of birdcalls blended with waves or rivers or rain would serve nicely too. Anything that bridges the gap between you in a building, in a vehicle, near roads, near human noise of industry and longing. Anything that puts you outside, puts you within your natural context, which is a world full of sights, smells, sounds, and touches that don’t originate in human acts alone.

We’re about to leave so much behind to go somewhere else, somewhere where I haven’t just been watching a memorial video of the seventeen people most recently murdered in another school shooting on February 15, 2018, the latest of eighteen school shootings so far this year. All of that will soon fall aside as I take you far, far away from here, to the most beautiful, wonderful place I know, where there aren’t shootings or other needless deaths, no environmentally triggered diseases, not even the ones from stress. Nope. I’m taking you way away from all of that. Did you find some music you like for this adventure? I settled on Andalusian Spanish Arabic music, , myself. Okay. Wonderful, then let’s go!

________

It’s summer in the town of Sunlight. Flowers bloom everywhere, but no one is allergic since there’s no diesel exhaust in the air to trigger delicate mammalian systems. The humid air is full of birdsong, as well as the sounds of stringed instruments, flutes, and drums, singing, and the laughter of children and adults alike—especially the older adults, who take great joy in surveying the generations at play.

I describe them as at play because there’s nothing resembling what you or I might call work, which is often something no one actually wants to do, or at least, heavily involves any number of tasks we’d rather not do. Not so in Sunlight. One of the things that will likely be hard to understand about this community is that no one there has ever been coerced into doing anything they don’t want to do. Ponder that for as long as you like. There are no exceptions, especially not for the children, the people we’re most used to seeing coerced and coercing. That’s not how things are done in Sunlight.

Sit with that information as long as...