Saw a bee on my roof this morning which I hadn’t seen before. It was a cold morning. The bee was still and sitting. Some shifting of weight with the wind. I took a photo of this bee. But there is a bee whose photo I could not ever take before, because ever since I started coming to this rooftop every day for a year, during the warmer days there would almot always be another bee a kind of yellow jacket bee, that would always aggressively say hello right up to your face, so there was never really a time I would attempt or even think of taking its photo as it tries to hover in front of my face.
But this still new bee, of white and black stripes whose wphoto I took, was almost frozen in time, as I captured it, shiftless in this wind, on this cloudy day, made me think of the moment of pause I was personally considering on this day which was a kind of milestone of a anniversary for myself. A worthwhile moment of silence and pause.
How Mark Twain would have written the above
After I wrote the above anecdote, I thought to ask ChatGPT to write this in the style of Mark Twain. Wow I am speechless almost how well this reads , below !
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There was a bee on my roof this morning, one I hadn’t seen before. The air was cold enough to still the world, and the bee seemed caught somewhere between waking and not. It shifted only when the wind asked it to. I took its picture — a small act, though it felt like more.
There had been another bee, all through the warmer days of the year. A yellow-jacket sort of fellow, bold as brass, who’d greet you straight in the face like he owned the place. Never once did I think to take his picture; you don’t take pictures of things that refuse to stay still.
But this one — black and white, quiet and patient — let me. It sat as though time itself had slowed down for it, or for me. And as I stood there, with the camera in my hand and the wind threading through the gray morning, I thought about how rare a moment of pause can be.
Maybe that’s why I noticed the bee at all. Maybe the stillness in it mirrored the stillness I was trying to find in myself — on this day that marked a year since I’d begun to climb this roof each morning. A year of noise and motion, and here at last, a silence worth keeping.