Staring at the sun is like a burning spicy pepper on your tongue, too intense, your eyes want to get away from it, cannot stand it for long, only a moment, like sipping too hot water, the reaction is automatic.

Colors are much like temperatures; an object with the same shape can be hot or cold, just like an object could be red or blue or anything in-between. Because fire is red, we think of red as a hot color, and because ocean and night are blue, we think of it as a cold color.

Night or darkness, when it is so dark you cannot see, is like being in an unfamiliar room and unable to feel anything around you despite trying. Each moment you feel like surely you must find a wall or a couch, yet can feel nothing.

Seeing a scene is like having arms and fingers of infinite length, thousands of them, they can stretch out from my body at lightning speed and touch everything around me, telling me exactly how far away they are and what shape they are, and where they’re moving or going.

To feel all that at once, may seem overwhelming, but it must be like what it is to know a room so well that you know where everything is in space. That sense in your mind of where everything is without needing to touch it, that is a kind of sight. Sight lets you do that exact thing, build that setup of the room in your mind, but without needing to touch everything first.

Light flows into the eye as smoothly as water past your hand, sight is effortless, and the eye’s hunger for light is never satisfied. The eye does not like to be denied light.

Touch can do things sight cannot, can feel the back of an object--sight can only sense the front, everything behind something is hidden, but touch can find it out. Sometimes the eye is fooled where the hand could not be because of this.

Sometimes the eye can be fooled, tricked, in myriad ways, it can see things that aren’t there, much as if someone handed you what they said was an eyeball but was actually a peeled grape or a hardboiled egg, you might be fooled. Or I might see a shadow against a lighter background in the night, like feeling a scratchy texture next to a smooth one, and think it the shadow of a person or a creature, for a moment. Perhaps that could be like running your hand along a textured wall and feeling like at times braille words are written there, but there are none.

Some sights are like music, colors blending into each other so beautifully and richly, like a gorgeous sonata conducted by a master. Like a beautiful sunrise, colors flow into color smoothly, like one musical note can blend into another, exactly like that, without distinct edges to the notes nor the colors.

What is amazing about sight is how precise it is, seeing so many details all at once. Actually it is an illusion, only the very center of vision can see fine detail as if you were touching something directly, and everything around that center is seen only indirectly and indistinctly, mere colors and shapes without the central spot of perfect clarity, like trying to feel something through a sweater perhaps, missing the details of it.

But the clarity of vision is incredible, able to see each of ten thousand hairs on my arm with a glance and almost all at once, able to see every key on my keyboard, but only focus on the details of one or two.

The bright sun to the eye may be like too-hot heat to the skin, something you feel you must get away from immediately, something you enjoy only indirectly like the warm glow of a fire rather than its flame, even causing pain in the eye from the intensity of it, but darkness is not like cold, darkness does not hurt the eye.

Instead total darkness feels suffocating somehow, like a blanket wrapped around the whole of you, choking off the air. Sight is so easy we come to rely on it, such that those in darkness are left crouched, barely able to walk, afraid to even step.

Sight is hardly like any scents, but in one sense it is, in the intensity of scents. You can understand the difference between intense bright blue and dark blue perhaps by thinking of the faint scent of the sea compared to the strong scent of sea. All colors can be strong or weak like scents.

If red is like fire, and blue like water, yellow to me is like a scream or a whistle. Some colors are naturally more vibrant than others, and yellow is the most vibrant of them all, except for white, the sum of all colors. Yellow is piercing then, yet also pleasant. We think of citrus scents and flavors, the lemon, because lemon skins are the purest yellow inside and out.

Green is a medium color, between the extremes of blue and red. It is the lukewarm color, room temperature color, the most common color, because the trees and leaves are green. Green has a flavor to me, that of succulent vegetables steaming fresh on a plate, especially broccoli which is a dark green.

Things can change very quickly in one’s sight, and the eye catches the smallest movement. In fact the eye draws your attention to movement instantly, is attracted to it. Most things the eye sees it tries to ignore, so as not to overwhelm you, and it does a good job. It might see a thousand things on the street, but if they are the same thousand that were there last time, the eye does not think them important. But if one thing is strange or interesting, it will draw you to it, much as if you heard a strange noise and set out to investigate it, even amongst the din of a dozen other noises that are familiar.

Sight can have strange things about it. Sometimes when I think of something strongly and look into the distance, my eyes relax and diverge--instead of looking at the same place they look in different places, causes me to see two of each thing overlapped on each other. The images in each eye suddenly disagree, and my brain doesn’t know how to put them together as one thing, so each eye fights for its version and the images may flutter against each other, various objects appearing and disappearing behind others, or seeming ghostly, there but not there, transparent, like thinking something is there but finding it gone when you go to reach for it.

But, when I stop this reverie, the eyes snap back to looking at the same thing, the two things seen become one thing again in my sight, and the image resumes. Eyes can be strange like that!

Sight is just one path to the real, that is what sight is.