On Tuesday evenings after work, I drive to the hillside home of C, my yoga/dharma buddy. From there, we carpool to the weekly sitting of the Seattle Insight Meditation Society on Capitol Hill. Last Tuesday, the view from C's yard was so beautiful that it stopped my progress to her front door. I took in the fresh green leaves of her trees, the flowers spilling across her her flowerbeds, the singing birds, and the sunlit lake in the distance below me. She came out of her door, laughed at me, and we were off to our sitting.

By the time we returned, thick clouds had replaced blue sky and darkness had fallen. She parked, and we chatted for a while in the carport behind her house. Our conversation turned to her new project: a short story. C is a successful novelist with a series of books to her credit, but she hadn't written a story for years, and was struggling to come up with a plot. She was drawn to begin her story by describing a dream she'd recently had: she and others were trapped in a building and stalked by a nameless and dreadful entity. The question was how the plot should proceed from there.

Talk of her dream drew us on to the topic of how other writers had depicted dread, then on to scenes from Stephen King books we'd read. Soon, the trees that had looked so gay in the sunlight hunched ominously over the long driveway I would have to descend back to my car. The birds had fallen silent. The heavy clouds blotted out the stars and added to the gloom, and the flowers, of course, were now invisible in the shadows. I felt a touch of dread building in my own heart as I bid C goodnight and scuttled to my car.

There is just one landscape in C's hillside, but there were two wildly different landscapes in my mind. And so I, and you, and everyone else sees reality: never clearly as it is, but filtered through the mind's preconceptions and expectations like something seen through a glass darkly.