I am in a straw bale hermitage. But I am not a Hermitess. The walls are pink and textured; the light distinctly sun through a window. I am a visitor in this room. Empty bunk beds fill one corner. I am joyfully alone.

Underground, lays a fiber through which light travels very quickly. It might be plastic. It might be glass. It is buried underneath the roots of cedar trees, decayed cockroaches, and the microbes that feed off of both. Light shoots east along the fiber, toward the ocean.

The light passes east along the fiber, underneath the LBJ ranch near Johnson City, underneath the hooves of show cattle bred by the park service in the historically stout 1970s style of President Johnson’s herd.

It passes underneath New Orleans, where a young activist, tattooed with the message “critical resistance,” serves margaritas out of a slushee machine five nights a week while the Mississippi river is held in place by concrete.

Once, a Quaker woman lived in this room. A few weekends a year, her city dwelling Friends would come out for their country weekend retreats, joining her among the prickly pear and live oak trees. On the rest of the days, she was a hermit.

The light shoots out of my computer and east along the underground fiber, to a complex of buildings on the beach of the Atlantic Ocean. There, the light is sorted and organized, prepackaged for the next leg of its journey. Down it descends along a glass or plastic fiber to the ocean floor.

It passes underneath miles of water, plankton, whales, seahorses, and algae. It passes under millions of pounds of hydrogen and oxygen that have melted off of glaciers and gushed through river channels down and out into the sea. The fiber is thin and it bears the weight of all that ocean while light shoots across it, eastward.

The light reaches shore. It passes across land, mountains and valleys and rivers and down under a sea and up onto shore where the light has a message for a server in the Middle East.

It is a request from me for a picture. I had pressed enter on a Google image search for “Gaza” and light traveled across the globe to obey my command. Now this Middle Eastern server grabs a picture and bundles it up in a package of light and it sends that light back west along the fiber.

Underneath the ocean it shoots, its zeros and ones blinking at the speed of light straight across the fiber that lays on the dark ocean floor. A moment ago I pressed enter on a Google image search and now the bottom of the ocean has light swimming along its floor.

A man is walking with his eyes closed down an alley of grey brick on all sides. “Gaza,” I searched for. He is carrying a limp boy body. It is a limp boy body covered in blood. Actual blood. I asked for an image that, based on the news I’d heard, I thought might be bloody. But the image is very bloody. It is actually an image of a man carrying a limp boy body covered in blood. It is a real image. I asked for it, and here it is.

I am sitting in a straw bale hermitage, a pink little building built for a Quaker hermitess. The loudest sound this place has to offer is a howling wind that whips the cedar and the brown grasses whenever the weather changes from warm to cold. This place was built to accommodate weekend retreats.

The light I control here with my enter key is not tired. It will travel at the speed of itself, the blink of an eye, in search of anything I ask it to. I am a visitor in this hermitage.