Perception versus reality

And speaking of mockingbirds, something strange happened the other morning.

The sun is rising now just about the time I leave the building, maybe a bit later. It's twilight, basically - bat time; I've seen a few skittering through the air chasing insects around the building lights with their jerky, un-bird-like flight and their scalloped, translucent wings. But after I walk around the corner of the building the lights are blocked for the length of it until the sun rises.

Walking across the grass in the quad under the lights the grass looks green, and when I walk around the corner it still looks green. Faint green, but green - and of course, it is green, isn't it, so I don't really think about it. But the other morning as I was walking to the bus stop quite suddenly a piece of the grass flashed white and leapt away from me. It was a mockingbird not ten feet away.

And at that moment, I was looking at the still-green grass and yet was completely unable to see the bird until it moved again. Now mockingbirds are not grass colored, and yet there it was, the same "color" as the grass it was walking through.

Clearly I wasn't seeing green at all. And yet my brain insisted I was.

Perception is a tricky thing.