Gallery of Shadows and Reflections

This is fairly recent, but it seemed fitting.

When one moves solitary through the world, echoes of the past can coil around one's being and whisper of oddities and losses and missed opportunities, of the crumbled ruins of beauty and life. Desolation can seem to fill your vision, and you can begin to feel as though you are the last, fading snatches of a dream, insubstantial, at the edge of oblivion. But if you move through these echoes and ghosts, these tears and wishes and longings, if you breathe them and let them pass through you, if you still your mind and truly listen-- in the silence and emptiness there is a song, a symphony. Its strains seem quiet, yet it surrounds us; we are immersed in it, floating in it, dancing in its waves. It is the stuff of dreams, of births and of lives and of childhoods spent racing through crumbling neighborhood streets overhung by the shadows of willow trees. It sings of beloved pets with warm brown eyes and lolling tongues, and sister-friends who with musical laughter weave tales of magic and wonder, and brothers who gaze through veils of time and space, touching this world briefly in greeting through the shell of a broken body before setting off for worlds unknown inhabiting an uninhibited mind. It sings of the snow-draped wood and crystalline waterfalls and those eyes of greybluegreen, dark hair tangled in an unruly mane. It sings of the child yet to be born, of the mother and the father that will love it and teach it and show it the miracle that is the world. It sings of hushed fits of giggling issuing from the mouths of children who are supposed to be sleeping, but who instead lurk around the shadows of a darkened house as they pretend to be adventurers seeking buried treasure. It sings of picking tiny strawberries from a backyard garden and wrinkling a tiny nose at their tartness. It sings of friends floating in frigid water at one in the morning with the spray of a nearby waterfall tickling faces soon numb with cold, as far above, stars streak across the black sky by the hundreds. Time melts away within the strains of this song; all simply is. To touch the song is to touch everything that is.

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When the two souls came together, they spun and spun and spun, light seeping into light, colors melding and blending in greens and blues, violet and white and rose, golden like the sun and silver like moonlight. The colors were music and the music was color. Galaxies and stars, eons and worlds and centuries, suns and moons and planet-rings and nebulae and millenia, seasons and years and cycles passed and swept beyond their united vision like a living organism. Together and one, they spiraled into infinity.

More older writing

Spread your wings, crackling with life, billowing in their own wind. Remember them, remember the starlight and the ocean's beckoning song. You are more than your hands and feet, more than the limits of culture and dogma and materialism and time and decay, these illusions, these wisps of nothing that have become everything. You are of the stars. You are of the earth. You are the wind, the ocean, the whispering trees and the black velvet of the night sky, the cleansing silver cascade of moonlight. You are the trembling bones of the earth, the shifting and folding and twisting subterranean dance, veiled in ancient dust and ancient tales, memory reviving. Touch the universe, and remember who you are.

There was once a land bordered by a deep and ancient forest, which was bordered by mountains so tall and treacherous, and so full of stories of terror and doom that none dared cross them, even though there had long been fables and whispers of a paradise beyond them.

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I woke up gently, the soft light of early morning dancing across the surface of my eyelids. The memory of last night seeped into my bones, and my stomach gave a little flutter as I turned my head to look beside me, though past experience told me what I would find. He always meticulously made up his side of the bed before he left, pillows plumped under the flowered bedspread which was folded back with its cotton sheet to accommodate my own slight form. He left no trace, ever. I had stopped questioning it long ago.

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