Dust of the moon

It is possible you see more clearly in the dark. You know that's what it's for - that darkness - to give your eyes a rest.  To let you feel your way.

You use it, that darkness.  Your hand is guided as you smudge the lines of shadows cast here.  The perimeter whispers to you.  You know where you are now.

A vessel, a sacred bowl.

In your hand, a black silk ribbon you always hold.  You let go and it unfurls, falling without fear.

Always the bearer of the perfect gift, it returns with just what you need.  

You breathe in a new tide, a weave of silver ore you must have longed for.

Violette de pensée

Violet of thought. But really pansy violet. A deliberate mistranslation. What else have you deliberately mistranslated?

Who you are? Well, of course, but everyone does that. What you do? Yes, that too. Especially that. Do you realize what you do? What you believe you are supposed to do? Why are knives your weapon of choice?

But it is my job, you said. No, my mission. My life's mission. There was a rite of passage, brief, instant, indiscernible to your child's eye. A hidden moment where you were taken to the cave of the ancestors, shown the drawings on the stones, given the the tools you would need - you had no choice, you know that now. As for what came afterward, what has come afterward, that is where the mistranslation resides.

Divine violet, true violet, you will wear it as a crown now. Paler than purple, it is still a mix a red blood and true blue. No need to excise the darkness though, you're going to let the blackness bleed out. These colors will be lighter.

Tenderness pink

Oh the places you'll go, they said. Mostly with warning.

When you started this, you did not know all you had to accomplish or all that would stand in your way. In the beginning it feels a bit like a bad vacation. Disappointing views, lousy food, crowded sights, bad company. But you will persist. You cannot not go. Not on this trip.

It gets worse, much worse. No longer a bad vacation, this is a trip to a hell. Black rage in your jaw, filled with what you have not said. Muddy fear is your aura, the truth cannot even touch you. But the smallest seed of grace, perhaps you were born with it, helps you find help. And so, blessedly, you will persist.

And when do you get to the heart of it all, to the essence of what you were certain did not exist, free it up. Use that shiny knife, not the dark one with arabesques that lie about the gutting it is used for, but the other one, the one that will cut clean through during this silent carving. The purest center revealed, pink. Mark this territory as claimed, dig the tip of the knife in the wood that frames the work you've done here. Handle up, it is a flag at half-mast. Victory and grief.

Resin of amber

You looked at that color for months and never saw it. You spent time with that color. Hours and hours. You were careless in its presence, ignorant, playing only the games you master.

And now look at you. One fine mess. Nothing is as you thought it was, you misinterpreted it all. Timbre, tone, vibration, breadth, width, depth. You don't even have the tools to measure these. Does it radiate, reflect, emit? This is no man-made color, your words will do you no good here.

When you finally saw it for the first time, you were surprised to find that you didn't even have a name for it. And that was only the first of many surprises. It changed, depending on the light. It was never what you expected. It reaches you, touches you - when was the last time that happened? You're no artist, colors don't affect you like this, do they?

In the end, you found the name in the scent. Your scent. It looks just like you smell. A warm, autumn scent, just like the color. Fossilized resin, its history in the scent, the journey in its color. Finally a word, not yours, but familiar anyway. Bewitching.

Ivy of the wild

You weave and climb and entwine and change colors with the seasons and never die. I thought you were just part of the beautiful landscape. I thought the sculpted stones you wrapped around held you up. I did not know it was the other way around. I did not know I inhaled your purest green of spring and exhaled your darkest red of autumn.

You are what I breathe. How could I not have known that? I have been told, shown, reflected and mirrored that endless times over these years. But those tales haven't always been easy to hear, the strength of heroes and villains too raw. And the shows, while breathtaking, have left the audience unsettled and uncertain. Reflections cannot be trusted, mirrors gather dust. I have never believed what I saw. Never trusted what I heard.

And so, here I am. You've waited patiently for me. You will watch me as I twist and wind and follow the path you made for me years ago. You will be at my side as I lose my fear of your darkness, you will witness my brave, blind steps into this wilderness. You will photograph the wave as it crashes into me - a revelation - each precious drop captured in suspended animation.

Tears of currant

When did you know it would be you? That you would be the one to finish this?

There were many before you, all just like you in one way, vastly different in all the others, time and life oblige. You could speak of inheritance (implies intent) or curse (implies evil magic) or trans-generational constellations (implies something prettier than is accurate). But those are just names. What does not change is that black pearl, that darkness you've met before. Not a dark companion, this is much more sinister than that. While it may look like ancient wisteria climbing on a tall tree, it is not. It is a swirl of bleakness and desolation that started oceans ago and has woven and textured and entwined for generations.

You are the end of that line. You made certain of that. It will find no future home. The price you had to pay is heavy, but bearable. Any other outcome would not have been.

To those who would have come, could have come, you blow them a kiss from across this line. You believe they understand.

If tears were to be shed, they would not be clear. They would be the darkest of purples, the blackest mix of red and blue, blood and truth.

Smoke without fire

How long do you think it had been there? It was a line, a cut, a fissure, a crack, a crevice, a gash badly healed, roughly scarred. You should have noticed it a long time ago. Why didn't you? Yes, yes, too busy, I know.

Anyway, somehow, it ended up on your list of things to do. You took a look and saw a splinter - which is weird because aren't our bodies supposed to reject those eventually? Maybe that's how it ended up on the to do list. You got a tool to dig it out. It hurt. It took your breath away.

Splinter in hand, you held it up to the light. And then you did what should always be done in these cases.

You incinerated it. You watched it go up in smoke, the glow of bile green blinding your eyes that were already closed. When you opened them, there were no ashes to be sprinkled.

Opera Red

A whisper should be felt, not just heard. It should be that close.

When it's not, for whatever reason, when it's just an ear-tease, when it isn't given the possibility to be what it was always meant to be, you eventually stop listening, stop believing. You no longer believe the words because their integrity is in the touch, they must be felt. And you no longer believe that touch will eventually reach you. So you give up. Not because it will have any effect - it won't - but because there's simply nothing worse than wanting and waiting and expecting what you will never have.

Unfortunately, it does not end there.

Some things don't ever fade. You just find a better place to store them. Somewhere that closets the intensity you cannot bear to witness and never touch. Nothing is waterproof, however. That intensity, that opera red, will seep out sometimes, making you think you're bleeding out, from inside your insides.

Earth of fire

The lock on my garage door is odd. You have turn the key away from the lock in order to lock it. It's completely counter-intuitive. It's not at all what you want to do. I've been locking and unlocking that door for years and it still hits me every time that it's very illogical.

We don't always get to do what we want to do. Does it sound like I'm stating the obvious? I'm not.

So what do you do when unlocking the door means turning the key towards the lock? What do you do when you can't do what your intuition tells you to do? When the creases in your soul are yelling at you to do something other than what you absolutely must do? I'm no longer talking about garage doors.

I don't know.

I suspect you try to unfold your soul, unfold it all, and take a look at what has gathered in those pleats. A story lies there.

Night blue

You think, for a time, that a brief séjour in the basement might do you some good. A salt-preserved, self-preserved time out. Your eyes get used to the artificial light, then to no light at all - lights burn out.

You keep yourself busy, you keep yourself company. You could build a whole life down here.

When you come up from this basement, and I swear you will, your hands will be full of all the things you never thought you could do. You try them out here first, in the dark, unaware that it's blue dark - the kind that speaks. You're so weary of the black dark that keeps secrets - but you're unaware of that too.

When you walk up the stairs and leave nothing behind, you will know.

That which is done in the dark is still true.

Forget-me-not blue

Find your treasure. Do it young, when you can find it instinctively, like a heat-seeking missile, no questions asked. At a time when you do not yet second guess yourself, a time limited only by the endlessness of possibilities.

If you lose it, and you probably will, isn't that what youth is also about, wait a few years before you go looking for it again, try out a few more things. Make reasonable decisions, live life in your mind and in the world constructed around all your reasoned choices.

Then remember what you're missing and find it again. But before you do, think about what that treasure really is. What you really want to do with it.

Will you open it, dig your fingers in deep and let its wealth cover your hands?

Or will you turn it into a picture so you can frame it and make it fit into your life - hang it over your lovely fireplace?

If that is your choice, you'll paint the frame blue. The blue of forget-me-nots. A silent and painful nod to what you allowed yourself to lose.

Pearl of darkness

A speck of dust, wrongly led. Usually by a shadowy friend, the lighting is very odd when it's time for a tornado. Who knows how you get a friend like that. Usually like an odd family heirloom, no one knows from where or why or how, but a presence is there now, accepted as part of the landscape.

There are those who will tell you pretty stories of an out-of-place grain of sand and a pearl, but that is not our story. Ours is a story of a speck of dust, led awry.

I do not know the physics of tornadoes, I do not know how warm and cold and high and low and wind and dust manage to dance together. But I am from the Midwest, I know the drills, I have spent time in basements. I have felt the chaotic swirl of that tornado for years, lived with its threat, its promise of destruction my darkest companion.

How have I really lived with it? I have dressed it up during the off seasons to take it out, decade and music helping me choose its accessories.

Rust of the anchor

I heard myself speak, a quiet insistent voice I did not recognize, loud only in its force. Unyielding force, but no push, just position. It sounded hoarse from the inside, its frequency having never touched the air.

It did not feel like brushed steel. Maybe tempered iron. In any case, a matrix of metals - elements I never knew belonged to me.

I cannot say I am comfortable with it, it feels more of me than mine. For now. But I do like the idea of mining, of a hidden mine manned by dedicated hands that seek not exploitation, but proper use of natural resources. Of earthy elements inside my own private earth.

Sediment

It is time to sort what you have been given, all of it. Pattern wire to do the cutting so you don't have to. Your only task is to witness the sift as it happens. There is no alchemy here, no transformation. Just the river bed and what will remain.

Make no mistake, you will be winnowed, your cooperation is not necessary. The cool current of a sigh will finish the work.

See what you can find in the remains, what you will be left with. Lick your shadow wounds, take your time. One day you will think of this as a good day.