You leave an incandescent home behind to enter the evening fully. Arbutus leaves crackle like parchment underfoot as you feel your way between the tumbled deck chairs, set akimbo to baffle the nocturnal deer. At the water’s edge your eyes and ears adjust: to a star-seasoned darkness, and the sea’s steady sip against the shingle. How could you have forgotten that the world has such stillness in it still?

The true horizon is hidden by these overlapping islands, their ragged profiles torn from a black more dense than night. And there are the mysteries: the lights gathered into communities — Crofton to the south, Chemainus, and eventually Saltair. Further: Ladysmith’s small smear behind the hills; the blinking beacon of an airport towards the north. And the constellations always in order above.

You wonder: how does the universe behave without us to observe it? Do we play a vital role in maintaining cosmic order, on this smoothed block of sandstone, remarking softly on all we see?

Do unwatched stars shift their positions like some intergalactic Times Square marquée? Will the sea’s mirror host antic reflections, the skiff hitching a sailboat’s smudged double to its waterline as a small girl dons an adult’s skirt for fun? Will the cities themselves play leapfrog up and down the coastline, when the human world is occupied in other dreams?

For now, though, you are pivot to a universal harmony, as the patient night waits to execute its anarchic designs.