5 posts tagged “life”
The shadows grew flustered with color. Their depths became lurid, pulsating with hidden meaning. Trees shifted nervously as they felt their bark become an agonizing skin. One's suffering was particularly dreadful. The cold air, fragrant with the earth's seasonal decay, had comforted it for hundreds of years. But suddenly it had become humid, drumming with the activity of invisible fingers - fingers that stripped the bark away, that polished the raw flesh until it was smooth, rounded and white.
Roots recoiled out of the ground. Branches merged together and lost their splintered netting: birds, carrying building materials in their mouths, flew elsewhere. The canopy of leaves exploded, tearing apart the living embroidery. And the sun illuminated what the modest trees had been hiding.
The surviving buds and leaves wafted down, settling on the white figure that was stiff with pain and the fear of separation from the forest and the maidens of Artemis. Knots in the bark disappeared except for two - and they became parallel and uniform: liquid, living galaxies of light. This chosen unfortunate felt its sap become thin and quick, running down a filigree of paths that marked a fleshy interior.
When the trunk split, it cried. And the sound drove the homeless birds flying through the torn ceiling. Around each piece there were vines and lianas, grasping fruits and spinning tendrils. It dragged behind it the emblems of its former life: clouds, mangroves, tropics, forests coniferous and evergreen.
However, its new circulation, its sparks that seemed to fire everywhere and nowhere, were insistent. And it walked forward, poised and praised, marked with triumph and transition.
When I was walking home, I saw a curious thing rolling towards me. It was small and light; it was blown across the sidewalk like a bite of tumbleweed. Or it could have been spools of dust drummed up from earth by a confused wind - bursting into confused shapes as it bounced off the sidewalk.
I walked towards it - it was momentarily still, shaking and weary in the indeterminate breeze. I looked closely. It was a bird's nest. Made of countless threads of dried grass and stripped twigs, it was a woven home, a knit of natural things, gently made through the diligence of two sparrows. Little bursts of life, with songs of boldness and pride, they built their nests every Spring, following the commands of the DNA coursing through their veins.
And now the results of one couple's homemaking lay at my feet. The nest was the color of dried flax, and it was the size of a cupped hand. The middle was hollowed out and lined with pale, winsome feathers. Down, plume, semiplume: the parents had dug deep into their breasts to tear out a cushion of warmth that would complete a bed destined to protect a chorus of helpless lives.
Once part of a sparrow commune hidden in the shadowy, airless eaves of the welcoming houses, an errant wind had lifted it from its moorings like Dorothy's prairie home, and taken it for a ride of confusion on the airy columns, streams and currents. Only instead of stopping to crush a witch, it stopped in front of me.
I was walking back to work, from the bank - congratulating myself that my purse hadn't been stolen (I held on to it, white-knuckled, all the way back).
At one point I passed a type of box hedge, dull and olive - its flat, sheared top just reaching to my shoulders. In its interior there was a lot of activity: I saw the leaves vibrate; I heard delicate rustles as the tiny inhabitants jumped from branch to branch. There were groups of twitterings rising to the surface and breaking free, the notes taking their place in the sky as if it was an endless, blue lyric sheet.
I really didn't understand anything that was being said, but surely the discussion was an excitable one.
Suddenly, pop!
From the top of the hedge there sprouted a flower. It had wings. It grew with quick, nervous movements. It had a beak which had once freed it of its childhood home, when its petals were still curled and weak. Its roots were not visible, twisted tightly around one of the branches which formed the dark labyrinth within.
Then: Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Four more appeared - an entire featheration of flowers. They spun on their stationary stalks with sharp, little turns: like the tiny ballerina dancing inside of a music box.
This garden, alive, breathing, driven by rapid flickering hearts, was growing only a foot or two away from me. But not a single blossom took its floating flight. They were in constant rotation: maybe they were looking for the sun, and were having trouble finding its warm reassurance on such a cluttered, dirty afternoon.
I walked away smiling. If I had dared to pick them, what a charming bouquet they would have made.
Show us what you're thankful for.
I am thankful for good times, with friends and family...
...for fruit juggling, and pink Kool-Aid martinis.
If you don't celebrate Thanksgiving, well, on November 22 do as we do: love your family, love your friends, and eat yourselves into a blind, stupid, stupor.
To my Vox friends - you know that if I could I'd invite you (and all pets) to the palatial Aubrey residence. I have a feeling that we would have the most famous of times.
"I know of a place where we can go where we please; and live like gypsies."
This quote was taken from the mini-series "The Buccaneers". It's only partially remembered and possibly entirely made up, like the novel this series was based on (Edith Wharton died before the novel was even half completed).
However. These words were uttered in a placating whisper by the governess Miss Testvalley to her impatient and impetuous charge, Nan St. George.
And where did they go? To a castle.
I remember the following scene: Nan running across bridges - her white skirts escaping behind her - dashing up towers, gasping over turrets, loving every brick of every shattered wall, every savaged battlement, every crumbling crenellation. Her arms were outstretched, as if she wanted to embrace every inch of architecture, every ghost of every past inhabitant.
But you can't. Atlas can straddle worlds, but can you envelop lives...history?
I know the way Nan felt. I've known those emotions - dazed by the sheer beauty of ravaged walls, of dark and still silhouettes. I love castles. I study them. I learn them. I climb them. I know them. I feel for them - during the 'slighting' of all defensive fortresses after the English civil war, when Cromwell ordered that they be shot and dented and made useless for any escaped Royalist...their solid and statuesque beauty was pocked with cannot shot.
But I love their ruins too - they aren't ugly; nor are they eyesores. I find their shattered outlines fascinating and graceful. I've seen their stray turrets, their isolated, incomplete walls set in the green hillsides like jewels. I can draw them by heart. Because they're already there.
Now, it's Aubrey's rule that she must walk to the very top of every castle she visits. I've nearly slipped and broke my neck on the rounded stairs of Caernarfon Castle, trying to execute this edict. I've got lost in Dover Castle (such sublime confusion!). I climbed the 180 steps to Tintagel Castle, wheezing in the sea air and Arthurian legend.
I've gazed through arrow slits, imagining my aim. I've peeked through acres of battlements, nearly swept over them by the winds crouching and waiting at the tower's very tops.
I've visited Beaumaris Castle, one of Edward I's handful of perfect fortresses (Caerphilly, Harlech, Conwy, Caernarfon) built on the English border to keep a stony eye on a temperamental Welsh population.
I've climbed the stairs of the keep of Rochester Castle - the tallest in Britain (125 feet). I've always enjoyed its baleful 'windows', which stare at me like massive blinded eyes.
I've come close to history: I roamed the inner courtyard of Framlingham Castle. In 1553 Mary Tudor gathered her loyal troops there - Edward VI had just died, and she needed to escape London, which had been taken over by the traitors who had forced the Lady Jane Grey to marry Guildford Dudley. Pathethic Jane had been proclaimed Queen, against her will, against statute and every law of royal inheritance. I was walking where the future Bloody Mary had paced: deep-voiced, determined, bitter, equally pathetic.
I've been overwhelmed by the past, by former lives pressing close as I walked through centuries-old hallways. How can the vanished become so real? I've been moved by cold walls and crumbling brick. How can a deserted pile of stone inspire a heart?
