Category: Pretty Pictures

Fire dozing

The end of a long day, the tension of too much history and too much pain and too many turns just wrong enough that the feeling is that of being lost in the woods even though the road is quite visible still through the trees.  All of it sitting in the belly, solid and weighty, very separate from the marvelous meal that rests in the official part of the stomach.

Distraction calls with its usual voice.  So long as we keep dancing with the flow of constant information, there will be no need to rest deep inside with the fear and the pain.

The fire is lit.

I start the music and by will and choice stretch myself out before it.  Warmth envelops me but I do not relax.  Or do I?  I drop the distractions and settle into my stillness.

The fire calls, pops and sings to me.  Not to get my attention, but purely to savour its own ravenous existence.  It will consume everything until it dies.

And it does not care.  It is enough that it will be for as long as the wood shall last for in that time it will be fully satisfied in its consumption.

Warmth reaches out to me just as I crave it to do.  But as of yet I would not beg for it.  Not yet, not quite.

And there I lie, basking in its warmth, looking into its depths, hearing it murmur to itself without any interest in my existence whatsoever.  And I glory in its indifference.  And I start to doze.  Lulled by its heat, by its fast progression of life, by its beauty, into a place of rest.

In the deep warmth of the fire, I shall rest.

Grandma Willow

She has seen many things and the passage of time is so familiar as to have lost meaning to her.  She is old, she is glorious.  Every few years a branch breaks off but always there are more growing.  Perhaps one day age will win over growth and she will pass fully into the land of the dead, but until then she remains, Grandma Willow.

I have circled beneath her branches, made magic around her trunk, as have many before me, of varied traditions.  None of that mattered to Grandma. She welcomes all as she will.  Many have drank beneath her, have been raucous, have been silent, have done drugs and drunk and stayed sober.  Have fed animals from her branches, have dangled feet over the ledge of her massive arms.

The squirrels dart along her branches, the birds sing in her leaves, and all the while she rests, growing and dying, and breathing, always breathing as we move on, and she remains.