December 31, 2016 - Faith

Now the deep sleep begins in earnest.  The thick white blanket has been pulled over all of life, like a veil across a temple opening.  We know there is a mystery hidden deeply within the holy chamber, but we cannot see it.  There are no signs of life.  The silence of death is comforting.

Hidden.

There is only one thing left now:  Faith.  Faith is the belief in something which cannot be seen, and it gives us evidence of unseen things as surely as if they stood before us.  It is the knowledge that everything coming into our world comes from the unmanifest, and that consciousness is the one true origin of reality.  Faith gives flesh, if persisted in, to those things for which we secretly hope.

Hope is the prayer.  Faith is the deliverer.

December 24, 2016 - Climbing the Mountain

I’m not sure how long I’ve been climbing the mountain.  A long time.  I’m told I’ve been climbing the mountain my whole life, but I’m not sure.  There was always another step to take, and so I took it, step by step.  Sometimes I lost my way, but I knew the general direction was up, so I kept on going.  Eventually, I’d find the next stair going upward, and I’d resume the climb.  Most of the time I didn’t even think about climbing.  I barely even thought of the mountain at all, let alone climbing it.  I just kept taking steps, and somehow I climbed the mountain. 

And now that I’m up at the top, I’m bitter.  At least, I think I am, but I’m not sure.  Bereft is more like it, and I’m angry that I didn’t pay more attention to the climb.  At the top of the mountain, I’m all alone.  There’s no one else to congratulate me on making the climb.  There’s no one else to commiserate with, no company for misery.  And it’s cold, too.  The wind doesn’t whistle, it howls.  No, it shrieks.  Sometimes I swear someone is screaming in agony behind me, but when I turn around, it’s just the terrible wind mocking me.  Or maybe it’s me.

There's a light at the top.

The barren branches of the trees go click-click-click back and forth as the wind hurtles through them.  They grasp and snap and beat at each other—click-click-click--and lower down the trunk, great groans and moans can be heard emanating from the foundation.  Like wizened old men, the trees groan and sigh as they are forced to move.  I feel the exhaustion and pain in my own legs as well.

The sun hasn’t shone for days.  It died a while ago when the ice came.  It was weak and the ice killed it.  Oddly enough, when the sun left, so did the water.  It could have been the other way around, but it doesn’t matter because now everything is dead.  The snow is cold, the wind is harsh, and everything that once lived is now entombed in sheets of frozen ice.  Like old wavy and bubbly glass, the windows into what’s beneath show only darkness.

Is this it, then?  Is this all there is?  It’s too much to bear, too much to think of.  It’s frightening how nothing can be so much more than something, and so much heavier, too.  So I just lie down then, a few feet from the top.  The gift at the end is nowhere to be found.  Wasn’t there supposed to be a gift?  I have nothing to show.  My accounts are as empty as my hands.  I close my eyes.

“But you are not listening,” comes a voice on the wind.  There’s no need to lift my head or open my eyes because I know no one is there.

“You are not paying attention to the beauty around you.  You are thinking too much about the scales of man and the weight of gold.  You are thinking too much about conflict and espionage, about outwitting your enemy, about betrayal, about loss.  You are thinking too much about the power of man and not at all about the power of alchemy,” says the disembodied voice.

I open my eyes and no one is there, as I knew all along.  I’m just a few yards from the top, and there’s a light somewhere up there.  But if I go to the top and find nothing, no gift at the end, the last bit of my heart will finally crack.  No.  I’m going down again.  I’m going back to the beginning.  I’m going to resume the climb.  What’s a half a century, give or take a decade or so?  I’ve got time.

Back down I go, and like the magic of a wormhole, I find myself at the bottom again in what seems like just a few minutes.  There’s a gazebo on a frozen and snow-covered lawn, and on this makeshift stage are several dancers, dancing to a Christmas jig.  The dancers’ noses are bright red from the cold, but they are smiling and laughing.  Click-click-click go their shoes, back and forth on the frozen stage.

There’s a crowd cheering them on and laughing, and there are many kinds of drinks being passed around.  Half of the people are laughing quite loudly, and they’re quite inebriated as well.  There are cheers and laughter, hoots and hollers, and a few drunken squabbles and shouts.  Altogether it is a raucous din and howl, but no one seems to mind and most people are smiling and laughing.  Click-click-click goes the dancers’ shoes, and the band plays on.

I wander over to a fire pit.  It’s warm there and the smoke smells good.  Someone good-naturedly presses a drink into my hand, and so I drink it.  Now I am even warmer.  The fire is so bright as the old tree trunks burn in it, and I find myself smiling.  How strange to be smiling after being so miserable such a short time ago.

All around the fire pit, the snow and ice melts and water drips freely here and there.  It runs down little avenues that have formed on the frozen lawn, like little rivers in a sunlit valley.  I tell myself that there’s something about the water I should probably remember, but try though I may, I cannot think of it.  So I forget about it and move closer to the fire.  And now I am laughing and shouting too and drinking more than I should, and click-click-click go the dancers’ shoes.  The crowd moans and groans and howls and laughs.

I’m not sure where the first step up the mountain is from here, but I’ll find it eventually.  I’m not in a hurry just now.  Tomorrow will be different.

December 18, 2016 - The King is Dead

The artist paints himself sitting alone at a table, looking into the distance for the person who will not join him.  This is the time he must face alone, at last.  Around him is only the cold and snow.  The table is empty and the glass of wine was finished a long time ago.  The colors on his old palette have all faded and dried and turned to grey.  But still he lingers, waiting.  Soon a fussy waitress will come by and ask him if he has had enough, and he will tell her that he has had quite enough, that he has had more than enough.

To the end, then.

Too much, in fact.  How did he get here?  Slowly and painfully, he remembers the steps in life he took.  Step by step he brought himself to the place where he is now.  He has no one to thank or blame but himself.  Retracing his footsteps would be pointless at this stage.  The time for that is long since over.  Now he must face what we all must face at the end as we look back one last time at our footsteps in the cold snow.

There is a perfect accounting system, and he pays his debt down to the last penny, which it turns out, is the very last penny he has.  And now that he is poor and has nothing else to give, he gains his freedom.  But at such a price.  Who would have guessed that the only way to have everything was to have absolutely nothing?

The year crawls to an agonizing close.  It is cold.  The days are short and the nights are very, very long.  The year climbs drunkenly to the end, teetering this way and that.  It’s too humiliating to watch.  To the top of the hill, then, he tells himself.  Just to the top of the hill and no further.  Then I will lie down.

The King is dead.  Long live the King.

November 27, 2016 - Standing

STANDING

While everything was silent and still

And I had surrendered

Because I was weak

One lone tree stood in salute

Watching

Not guarding

There were no guards left

We were defeated

We knew it

And He knew it

But still the tree stood in salute

I thought it would be cut down

For insolence

For arrogance

For defiance

But He seemed not to notice

It was a ruse

He knew

But He hoped we did not

So there it stood

In loyalty

In duty

In secret knowledge

It was just enough

Just barely

But then I stood, too

If I stayed down

It would be my own choice

If I stood

That, too, would be my own choice

If I were cut down

That would not change my choice

And He knew it.

November 20, 2016 - Dark Days

Ghosts are everywhere now.  Once we made fun of them by carving pumpkins into strange faces and placing candles within.  We stuffed scarecrows full of hay and leaves and tied them to poles.  We fabricated tombstones and placed them in our yards.  “Bring out your dead!  Bring out your dead!” the call went out.  Then the festivities began.  We mocked death.  We laughed at it.  The more grotesque we could carve our pumpkins, the funnier we thought it was.  It became a contest.  Death became a contest of who could mock the end the most.

Old and withered nests.

But the laughter is all gone now.  The false bravado we showed disappeared with the first wail of the banshee during the daytime.  No longer confined to the night, the harbingers of doom now wander during the filtered daylight, and all festivities have ended.  The Jack-o’-lanterns have shriveled and morphed with their facial features turning inward, like macabre dried and shrunken heads.  We need only place them upon tall pikes whose ends are buried in the Earth in the front of our yards to show our enemies what befalls those who would cross us.  Echoes of Vlad the Impaler.

The scarecrows, once plump and smiling at party guests, now lean over in twisted and tortured ways.  Death has come to life.  And every day, the ragged creatures seem to change their positions just a bit.  At first we thought it was just the wind, but the wind does not make bodies of straw reach out in menacing ways.  The wind does not cause hands of sharpened willow twigs to reach out and rake through our hair.  The wind does not cause the sneer on the faces of the soulless greeters.  No, something else is at work here.

Yet we knew it would happen, didn’t we?  That’s why we played the game in the first place.  We are not afraid, we told them.  But we lied.  We always lie.  It doesn’t matter now.  It’s not like we had a choice.  The King was cut down in the Fall.  The enemy has free reign, and even now we hear the Lord of Winter’s army approaching.  The drumbeats grow louder and incessant, and the Earth shakes with the hooves of thousands of black horses.  The day will come when we pray to have just the simple banshees again and an occasional murderous scarecrow.

These are the dark days.

November 13, 2016 - A Shift

Can you see him?  It requires a shift in perspective to see him, but can you do it?  Can you shift yourself from your “normal” expectations of what you think ought to be there and instead see what is there?  If you can, count yourself among the lucky.  And if you can see him and those like him without being told where to look, count yourself among the blessed who have the sight.  They see without the interface so necessary to most people.

One of the helpers.

He is out and about now in the dark half of the year, and there is no need to hide in the forest anymore.  The sun will not notice the tearing down of things now; he is far too weak.  This is the time when the Piper must be paid and the gold must be returned.  These are the beings who ensure it.  We might look the other way and tell ourselves that it’s all in our imagination.  We might tell ourselves that the gold is ours to keep forever.  We might pretend that this is not part of the bargain.  But in the end, we know we are wrong.  The accounting system is perfect.  The invoice is exact.  The reckoning is always near.

The old dam crumbles slowly and he helps it along.  Leaks have sprung everywhere, and most of us have forgotten the reason the dam was built in the first place.  Perhaps when it is finally destroyed we’ll remember again.  Maybe then we’ll come back and chase the destruction back into the forest.  Maybe we’ll build it back up strong and sure again, so certain in our knowledge, so haughty in our wrongly perceived ability to control the force of Water.  Maybe we’ll pretend that everything in the world just falls to chance, that there is no rhyme or reason.

But those who can see know the rhyme by heart.  It’s a simple one, like hopscotch to a child.  The rhythm is in their blood.  They hear it even when they do not want to.  They shift naturally from this state to that.  They know how things build up and they know how things are destroyed.  And they know why.  They know that out of nothing comes something and that the something always returns to its origin.  They know that the gold is held in a trust fund, and the beneficiary waits in the forest.  Still.

November 6, 2016 - The Summer Witch

THE SUMMER WITCH

It slipped through our fingers

the intoxicating elixir

we longed to hold

to keep

our own precious store

each one of us hid a veiled cache

a secret . . .

but it dripped away

as a summer rain

the heady fragrance

and soothing moisture

the red warmth

how we basked in plenty!

but she lied to us

and we begged her to do so

again and again, we begged for the lie

we wanted to believe her

to drink the secret potion

but it slipped away

through our grey and bony fingers

that we still stretch out

hardened as stone now

reaching and searching

looking for the Summer Witch