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Showing posts from March, 2021

The Forest's Attention

Once a year there is a dance put on by forest folk. There is laughing and feasting and great steps round and round that are met by all who watch it with eyes of wonder.             It does not have a particular date, this dance. There is no ready calling that announces its presence or heralds the coming of the time.             The date is set when the moment is right. And for that, we must pay attention.             If one fails in that attention, the forest will give up its dance—magic must have someone to bear witness to it after all. And there have been years when there has been no one who sits with the long rhythm that lends sight to the moment of the annual gaiety. For this one moment is begot by gravity and gentle care, a sacrifice that leads to the merriment; a heavy price to pay for an observer.             If no one pays the price, the forest has no dance, and grows smaller.             Soon, like the fairies, it will wink out.             And then, what is left?

The Woman in the Tower

Once upon a time a woman sat alone, locked at the top of a stone tower.             When the people who had come to settle near the tower first approached it, they discovered her locked inside, and set about freeing her. The question as to whether she had been put there, or whether she had voluntarily ascended was to become a moot point, for when the door was finally unlocked, she refused to descend. Indeed, so often did those who wished for her liberty come to the door of the tower and try to remove her from the top most room in which she had once been locked, that, after a time, she discovered a way in which to lock herself in—and all others out.             It is unknown how long she remained locked in the tower room, for no one could get inside to see her, until a sizable knight, who happened to be passing, was asked to go up and use his hefty shoulder to beat down the door.             But when he did so, it was discovered that the tower had been abandoned; the woman’s where

The Coming of Spring

 There was a crack that sounded, a branch snapped in two. It happened alongside the rollicking flow of a river. The sound was telling, for it was that of a frost that had broken, sharply, suddenly and the air poured over with sunlight.     A princess stood, bathing in that sunlight.     She wanted nothing more than to hear the sound of a thousand branches snapping, for that was the kind of mood she was in; wild, destructive, filled with a kind of wonder-power invigorated by the sound of the rushing river and the sudden sun.     Thus did she tramp about the wood in which she found her patch of sunlight, bathing and snapping branches in equal measure.     And when she was diagnosed by an owl who observed her strange dance in his silent nonchalance, he found that she held in equal parts a crazed delight in the warmth of the sun and a stirring madness born by too much stillness.       In short, he called it, the coming of Spring.

Notes on a Grey World

Once upon a time, when the trees lit golden from a sudden hit of sunshine after the rain, the world blasted into a mass of colour. It was the kind of explosion that comes from things remaining dormant for too long—a stinting that results in an over-reaction to strike the balance. In this case, the world had been dull, dark, and lifeless for too long. The cloying horror of the sticking dismal status had pronounced its sentence too lengthily. Simply put, the world had born a burden too shuddering to bear. Thus, in exuberant retaliation, the world burst, the dishwater cast pushed over, the veil of sullen clouds and heavy dimness lifted, and wonder ushered forth in bright and brilliant waves. And so it will happen, again and again, whenever the world turns grey.