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Showing posts from February, 2022

The Subtle Notes of Hope

 The Hellabore were bent in the dawn light. They looked as though they were breaking. Weighted down with ice and snow, they had come too soon in a fluke warm spell that promised Winter's turning.     The morning crept on, and the sun grew stronger. The day was cold, a winter's bitter chill filled with shivers and desperate basking with any chance offered.     And the Spring flowers, they died. A brutal death. Only from hoping too soon.      It was enough to kill my faith.     Enough to singe me to my core and let me wither in the thought of Winter boring on and on.      But then I saw the Hellabore in the midday light. Not broken. Not even bent. But sprung. A striking resurrection.       The rest of the early flowers will go to their graves, and for them I mourn. Yet.     Hanging on a lifeline, on the thin threads of sight between my eyes and the Hellabore, are small dots woven in the staff of a melody: the subtle notes of hope.

The Few and the Many

 Once upon a time the world grew allocated in such a way that a small sliver of its people found themselves with infinite choice.     They chose, and they chose, and they chose.     Until it hooked into their very flesh like an addiction gone mad and ran them to misery.     The rest of the world suffered no such fate. Indeed, it was from their labor and toil that the small sliver received the possibilities of their infinite choice. But the cost to the many was severe, and it lay in the broken and dampened bodies and minds, the poured worth that fell concentrated in the ever-font of poverty, injustice, and greed.     It was strange, then, what happened next; for one might think it hopeless.     But where there is time, there is hope.     On a day that seemed as though it would be much like any other, the system shattered. It began with a smaller set within the sliver that set aside their choices, and found their misery lift. The news spread, and like stone toppling stone, choice was lai

The Woman Who Confronted a Dragon

 There was once a dragon, fearsome and deadly, who was horribly cruel to a tiny village.     Each day the dragon came out of his cave that lay in a crag atop a stony mountain and burned a field. First the wheat crop, then the barley, next the tomato harvest, and then the strawberries. Soon the villagers would have no food left.     And so the village gathered.     The men talked. And talked. Of climbing the mountain with pitchforks, of making a treaty they could ill afford with rampaging knights, of moving away from the village to settle anew...     Consideration after consideration was offered. Yet there was no resolve.     All the while, a new day was fast approaching.     Finally a woman left the village, climbed the stony mountain, and dared to venture into the cave where sat the dragon, breathing the fumes that were all that was left from the day's burning.     She asked the dragon a question.      'Why?'     The dragon looked at her. Perhaps it was the vehemence of th

The Tired Old Bell and the Ringer

 There is an old tired bell that sits in the middle of an arch atop a well. It was rung once, long ago. For the world had collapsed within itself into crumbling chaos, and it was a time of desperation and darkness and despair.      The ringer felt all those things, additions to the soul that seemed a permanent part, so entrenched, so much a permanent fixture, that it was as though they had always been there.     But they hadn't.     Once the ringer's soul was pure, and filled with longing wonder.     It was these things that were permanently written on the ringer's soul.     It was these things that gave the courage to walk, and then to crawl, and then to paw a hand at the bell rope, a last act before what appeared an inevitable bitter end.     The bell rang out.     Crystal clear and cutting.     The sound that rang was hope.     And it was all that was needed to build the world anew.