Catching Noah's Light

A note before you start.

This one comes with a song called “Small Bursts of Light.”

I filmed my own laptop screen with my phone. That’s the part that still makes me laugh. I was sitting in my studio, phone held up to my monitor, recording a video call I was already on, so I could play it back to the man on the other end of it.

Noah benShea is eighty one. A poet, a philosopher, the kind of man who has a serious composure until he doesn’t. We’d been talking for months over Zoom, working on forty years of his writing, and there was this one small problem neither of us could fix with words. He’d forget the camera was above his screen. His eyes would drift down to my face on his laptop instead, and on my end, it looked like he was reading something off a page. It broke the one thing I didn’t want broken. The connection.

The Eye Line

So I found a camera that clips onto the top of a laptop, with a little arm that swings down so the lens sits right where his eyes naturally land. No studio, no crew, no budget. Just a small piece of hardware and his own Mac laptop. He wasn’t sure it would work. I wasn’t completely sure either.

Then I played it back for him. And I watched his face change. That’s when the smile came, the one that breaks through the composure. He was tickled. Genuinely tickled, like a kid who’d just seen a magic trick land.

He thanked me afterward. Not for the technology. For the fact that, for a few seconds on a screen, it looked like he was looking someone in the eye again.

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Coffee With Noah

We’ve known each other for about thirty years. Noah’s a fixture in this town, the kind of person everybody in Santa Barbara seems to have a story about. A few months ago we were having coffee and he was telling me about Jacob the Baker, a series of books he wrote years ago that got turned into a film and still sits on Amazon today. People had been asking him for a prequel, and he was doing the math out loud, how many years a book like that takes to write, how many years he actually has left to write it. It wasn’t self-pity. It was just arithmetic, the kind you start doing at eighty-one.

I made a joke. I told him I’d written a book the weekend before. He laughed, then he stopped laughing and asked how that was even possible. I’d used my own platform, the one I built for myself long before anyone else touched it, to write something called A Moment in Time, a six-hundred-page illustrated book that looks at history sideways, tracking eight different countries at once from a thousand years before Christ to twenty years from now, so you can see what else was happening in the world the moment something famous happened somewhere else. He’d heard vaguely that AI could write things. He’d never sat across from someone who’d actually used it to finish something real.

He asked if I could help him. That was it. That was the whole beginning. One offhand joke over coffee, and a few months later we have a website, a Substack, a strategy for Facebook and Instagram, a mailing list, songs written from his own words, and a business built entirely out of forty years of one man’s writing and philosophy. He’s spent his whole life trying to get his words out into the world. He just never had anyone who could move as fast as the thoughts arrived.

That camera arm cost less than dinner for two. It solved something money alone never would have. And it’s a small example of the same pattern that started at that coffee table, technology doing the moving so his voice doesn’t have to slow down to fit it.

The Fear of Missing One

He didn’t have a name for the thoughts that kept arriving. They just showed up without warning, while he made coffee, while he sat with his wife, and he’d text them straight to me, asking me to add them to our notebook. For a while that meant watching my phone for his messages and copying them over by hand, and it was the fear of missing one, of some thought slipping past me and disappearing for good, that finally pushed me to build something better. First Light was already the name of the whole project, so light was already the language we were living in. Fireflies just showed up as the obvious next word. Small bursts, there and gone, unless you catch them.

The Same Jar Twice

So I built him a jar. Not a real one. An app, simple enough that an eighty one year old who has never called himself technical can open it and just talk, or just type, the moment a thought arrives. It wasn’t until later that I remembered he’d already written about a jar himself, decades ago, a short parable called The Pickle Jar about the kind of solitude that sneaks up on a person in the middle of a crowded room. I hadn’t borrowed the idea on purpose. It had been sitting in his own forty years of work the whole time, waiting for someone to notice the two jars were really the same jar.

Every firefly he catches goes somewhere now. Into the work. Into the website. Into the strategy we’ve been building together for four months, all of it drawn from forty years of writing that already exists, never invented, never put in his mouth. If it sounds like him, it’s because it is him. I made a rule early on, nothing gets conjured. Every word traces back to something he actually said or wrote.

What He Handed Me

I’ve wondered what it feels like to have your phone buzz with your own thought before you’ve finished thinking it. Noah didn’t really answer that when I brought it up. He handed me something he’d already written years earlier, in a collection he calls Small Truths, small enough to read in a minute, sturdy enough to carry a lifetime.

“Sometimes you hear something at just the right moment to answer something for which you very much needed an answer. You can think this is a coincidence but the word coincidence at its root means ‘things falling together.’ And in a world which so often feels like things are falling apart, sometimes the unexpected arrival of an idea or thought appearing unexpectedly is a sign that things are falling together for you. And that is a sacred sign both for who sent and who received.”

That’s Fireflies, four years before Fireflies existed.

What I Actually Built

I didn’t set out to build technology. I set out to solve one problem for one friend, how do you get a lifetime of wisdom out of a man’s head and into the world before it’s too late to ask him what he meant. The eye line camera and the firefly jar are the same idea wearing different clothes. Both exist so something true can travel the short distance between one person and another without losing anything on the way.

I’ve spent two years building a platform around that idea. This week, we’re four weeks from putting it into other people’s hands. But if you asked me what I actually built, I’d tell you about a smile on a screen before I’d tell you about the software.

Listen to “Small Bursts of Light” on Suno

Through Another Lens is also a podcast. Every Sunday Story gets read aloud. Listen on Apple Podcasts

You can read Noah’s words on the Substack I’ve built for him.