Sunbeam

The sunbeam acts upon the skin.

As when a snake, that through the winter's cold / lay swoln and hidden in the ground from sight, / gorged with rank herbs, forth issues to the light, / and sleek with shining youth and newly drest, / wreathing its slippery volumes, towers upright / and, glorying, to the sunbeam rears its breast, / and darts a three-forked tongue, and points a flaming crest.

The first sunbeam, she knew, would be her death.

With appropriate laser light, we can see individual atoms with the naked eye the way we see dust motes in a sunbeam.

The black cat napped peacefully in the sunbeam.

Sunbeam snakes kill their prey with constriction.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

I cut-in various other material to this; for instance, a shot of a rushing brook in springtime, with dancing sunbeams reflected in the water; of birds splashing in the village pond; and, finally, of a laughing child.

Similarly, the rays diverging from the sun will pass by you and converge on the point directly opposite the sun, the shadow of your head. All sunbeams, and thus all shadows, appear to converge there.[…]Only perspective makes all shadows appear to converge on the antisolar point. But this point is also the center of the rainbow, so as you look at the rainbow, all sunbeams and shadows will lie along radii of the bow as they flow straight to its center.

I had frequently had to explain to cameramen that only in the early morning or late in the evening did sunbeams fall from the window as flat as they were usually found in films. The sun being higher during the hours of work, another way of showing sunbeams had to be found.