"...the little silver flash...follows the setting of the sun, making a brief crescent of light no thicker than the crescent of a fingernail along the horizon line" says the story of Umai, a girl of the Yurok tribe who yearned to know what the crescent of light was.
Umai took her canoe to the edge of the world:
"She sat at the world's edge, watching quietly. She saw that the sky does not rest solidly on the ocean, but that it lifts and dips and lifts and dips in an even rhythm...and she saw that it is this dipping sky that causes the waves...
"The sun went down behind the edge of the world and was followed by the familiar silver flash. But from so much closer up, Umai saw that it was not at all a narrow crescent, but a waving, moving something with a center of living brightness..."*May 2010 be filled with good health, and a center of living brightness for us all.
* This story is told in The Inland Whale: Nine Stories Retold from California Indian Legends by Theodora Kroeber, published in 1959.
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