Tag Archives: shadow

Here I am. Now.

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Honey Badger is not alone. Dead people don’t care, either. Even if they’re going to be reincarnated, they couldn’t possibly care less, I assume, about what anybody thought of them in life. The past is a lock.

What matters, if anything does, to the dead as much as to the living is what’s yet possible (if that includes reincarnation). The only way to get to the future, furthermore, is to be present in the present. All of the yesterdays that ever were can only be altered—at least without a time machine, which, of course, must be built in the present or future since there isn’t one yet, other than the hard to find Vernean one or the wonderful TARDIS of course—by improving the outcomes of those yesterdays in the present and future. Funny how that all works.

But what it tells me is that while I can (I very much hope) learn from the past, there’s no benefit in dwelling on it. And I don’t even think there’s much to be gained from living exclusively for the future. I’m not guaranteed one, after all. I could be caught unawares by a fatal disease, slip on a blot of mud and fall off a cliff, or be eaten by aliens tomorrow. And I can’t be sitting around knitting my brow and fretting over whether anyone will express admiration and gratitude for the wonderfulness of me after that happens.

I’d like to be way too busy until tomorrow, or whenever that cutoff time arrives, to expend any real energy conjuring up what grand eulogies I’ll get and what perfect art will be applied to my tomb, when I’ll be much too dead to care. Not to mention that whether I’m cremated [post-mortem, thankyouverymuch!] as I intend or it’s because there’s nothing left of me but my socks and hat after the aliens ingest me, there won’t be any need for a tomb. In any case, joy and contentment should be usurping all of the space that any such thoughts would aim to occupy. I prefer to think that I’m living out my eulogy, and lest it be of any interest to anyone but me, the most fitting one I can imagine would be that I was too busy living to sit around for a funerary portrait.

I know that I am loved. That is the best of all possible epitaphs I could possibly desire. And it’s a cheering enough thought to keep me occupied for as long as I get to be in the Here and Now. I guess my job is to pass it along to those in my immediate vicinity, my small orbit, so that they might be able to make the same claim.photo

The Green Man is on the Move

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digital artwork from a drawingThough he may well have sprung from the roots of ancient earthbound deities, the Green Man remains alive and well and, at this season, inhabits garden and woodland alike, filling sun and shadow with his mischievous magicks. And this presence is a very welcome thing indeed. Few things can compare with the appearance of those tender sprouts, however miniscule and vulnerable, that bring new signs of life to the winter’s loamy floor, unfurl their banners on the tiniest twig of the smallest shrub. The mere sight of one small tip of leaf can bring an upsurge of life to the dormant veins of even a hardened person who’s waited through the dark and chill for newness to arrive.

Did the long freeze of January kill that little sapling that I found? No, here’s the faint, alluring swelling of a bud, the blushing edge of a leaflet, soon to open wide in exuberant yellow-green shouts of Spring. Has the ice of the short days and long, long nights wholly buried and killed my favorite herb, both branch and root? No, I see a hairline stripe of promising verdure in the bony bark of its woody little stem. Life is a bold, determined act, and with its brazen call brings out the denizens of Earth, first the bud and then the bloom, one small broken seed shooting out a multitude of growing things at the conjuring wave of the Green Man’s hand. Like him, I cannot help but grin when the world begins again to wake in leafy laughter.

All the Colors

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When we speak of something having ‘all the colors of the rainbow’ I am certain we don’t quite understand the enormity of such a thing. My sisters and I used to criticize badly designed or tasteless clothing, interiors and the like as being so artificial and clumsy because they were of a ‘color not found in nature’–but then, too, our thinking was far too constrained. For nature, that queen of design, has more colors than can be perceived, let alone understood, by mere human eyes and minds.

She’s a trickster and a lavishly opulent over-doer, is Nature. We are much too small to comprehend the fulness of her range and beauty. What seems like one rather simple thing at first often morphs, as we look and imagine further, into something far different and most likely far more subtle and complex.

I was reminded of this last night when I sat down with a new set of children’s marking pens–the cheap permeable-tip markers that last for about five drawings but cost a tenth of what the ‘professional’ pens do–and began to sketch something leafy. As soon as I began I knew that one kind of green would not make a leaf; no, I knew that all four kinds of green supplied by the manufacturer of this little bag-of-pens couldn’t begin to be sufficient to convey the character of the simplest, plainest sort of leaf-like thing, let alone give a hint of the way light might play across it in different climes, at different times of day. Or how much its appearance must be affected by my own vision, my mood, my expectations.

Our abilities to envision, physical and metaphorical both, are fluid but can never quite keep up with the mysteries around us. And that, my friends, is a fine excuse for forging ahead into the puzzling and problematic and pearlescent thing that is the future . . . .

colored markers on paper

How It Works

In Haiku,

Reality takes

Sudden swerves