pleading the 4th

Free Ride

When she was young, and everything seemed too much, she could go out to the paddock and catch the pony, and go riding... It felt as if the horse understood her feeling of needing to get away, to go so swiftly that the wind of their passage blew away all thoughts, and the rocking motion of their galloping was all there was to feel. Fields and meadows stretched out before them, fences were left behind, nothing mattered but their united desire to run fast and far and free.

It helped. Returning more slowly, they were both calmer. The shared joy of their flight was rounded out by a shared gentling down with the grooming, and the handful of sweetcorn or crimped oats given with grateful love; before she returned to the house, to the crumpled school uniform needing to be hung up for tomorrow, the latch-key child's solitary tea, and donning the armour of a decent frock for dinner.

As an adult, with no horse, she pined for a freedom like those childhood rides. She bought a bicycle, with the idea of riding it swiftly down the country roads, but it didn't feel the same. There was no shared flight, no sense of being one with a stronger creature who could carry her away from everything. And there were too many cars on the little roads now, housing estates popping up like great unwholesome fungi in every field and meadow, sometimes men whistling and shouting from their cars as she went by. She came home tired but not made whole. The bicycle gathered dust in the garage, and her dreams were filled with horses, with flight, with unbounded skies.

green

all around me is green
and it is raining,
and there are even roses
on the one precious bush.
i am trying to let the rain
wash my heart
and do the crying for me.
i hold a wet rose to my face
to remember what hope smells like,
what love feels like.
i was shaped not for faith
perhaps, but for continuing
in its absence.
green is the colour of hope
they say, but i believe
it is the colour of enduring,
of beginning again
and again and again
despite it all.

Making Peace

The light shone through the broderie Anglaise hem of the woman's dress and made a string of flower shaped shadows on her ankles, twinkling like stars as she walked slowly down the path to the sea. Her braided hair hung and swayed at her back, still golden, or hiding any silver strands amongst the ruddy blond. Watching as she walked behind, Runa thought for the hundreth time how beautiful her mother was still, how gracefully she moved. More than just surface beauty, too; her mother was one of the kindest, gentlest people she'd ever known. Apart from a few thorny years in early adolescence, Runa had always been very close to her mother, and wondered how her father could have looked anywhere but at his wife. She was too young yet to know how fickle hearts can be, and how desire may die when its object sits at the breakfast table daily, or how a man may be filled with jealousy when a child's needs are met ahead of his. She was also too young to understand how broken people break others, or the costs and sacrifices that keeping home tranquil could require. Life was quieter when he left, and no less rich for there being less money. Her pale mother shunned the sun during the day, but sunset on the beach was a ritual she kept every fair evening that she could. They dined at sundown year 'round because of this, and when Runa was little, she had found it magical how elastic time was in their home compared to the clock-driven hours of other people's lives. This evening, the air was soft, nearly windless, and the waves regular and low. They stayed until the colours faded to indigo above the sea, and turned for home as the first stars began to dance behind the dunes. The house lights beckoned, and they moved homeward in a deep and wordless peace. From this place, she went out into the greater world to school or work, but it drew her gladly back and knitted up any sorrows or perplexity. Whatever hard bargains or blood offerings had been made to keep its warmth and calm, it was worth it. The space held and soothed her like an extension of her mother's arms, which in many senses it was. She was only just beginning to suspect that peace was an everyday work, a sustained focus on what mattered most. It seeded in the heart, was tended carefully, and flowered with no less devotion than a garden needed. 

shades of mourning

she keeps the high holidays of the heart
in the silences that most try to avoid
hardbitten lessons learned at baba's knee
learned in the things not said aloud
in the kid-gloved handling of husbands
and little barnyard tragedies
read in bones found scattered in the woods
left by hunters, or by simple aged deaths.
whatever goes long missing leaves a want,
unspoken aches, and hungers left unfed
and loss breeds lies like death brings flies, it's said.
so, survivors knelt in temple or in church
so, the prayers were whispered soft from memory
so, the widow's veil like pecked-out eyes
occluded sight, concealed the causes
of shed tears and years of hurt.
only in silence can the truth be found
maybe it was love went missing
and not the men themselves
she saw the widows thriving in their lack,
not speaking ill of those long dead and gone
the truth lies buried in the ground
the graves of loved and unloved tended just alike.

Dumkopf Uber Alles

Chim-chimeny, chim-chimeny, chim-chim-cheroo
You elected a fascist, let’s see what he’ll do...
Chim-chimeny, chim-chimeny, chim-chim-cheree
He’ll start taking rights---both from you and from me,
There goes our health care, without plans for more,
And the hate groups are laughing as memberships soar,
The White House a circus of buffoons and boors,
A president tweeting of nuclear war,
Chim-chimeny, chim-chimeny, chim-chim-cheree
Parades feature Klansmen and alt-right Nazis,
Children imprisoned as racists all cheer,
Journalists subject to threatening jeers.
Chim-chimeny, chim-chimeny, chim-chim-cheroo
His election’s a thing we will all live to rue---
Well, at least those who *do* live
To see this mess through..

The Wood-Witch's Wisdom

The witch lived in a house in the forest, as witches often do. It was, in fact, a gingerbread house of sorts, or at least a house with "gingerbread" trim that curled and scrolled about its eaves and porch. The house had been built a few lifetimes ago, when the forest was more of a meadow with a belt of woodland around it; in the intervening years, buttercups and daisies had given way to beech, oak, and pine. The house was now invisible from any of the land around it, and too dark from trees to grow more than a small garden, but the patch of sky above it showed the stars beautifully at night.

She lived more or less alone, apart from a three-legged dog and a cat with one eye, and various other creatures like the hedgehog family that came and went from the herb bed and potting shed. It seemed that the witch, being so very whole herself, attracted the broken and spiky and reviled beings of the world. Some came to be healed and fed and loved, and others, usually men, came to poke holes in her as if they couldn't help it. She fed and loved them too, for a time, but often they didn't heal. The persistence of brokenness puzzled her. Men puzzled her on the whole. She regarded them much as she did the black snake that occasionally sunned itself on a stone at the wood's edge: rather beautiful, in its way, and undoubtedly useful in the grand scheme of things, but cold-blooded and sharp of tooth, and potentially dangerous.

It was autumn, and the leaves were a glory and a song upon the trees, setting the eye ablaze and the mind a-dreaming with beauty and change. The witch wandered about gathering wood to see her through the winter, and collecting what the forest offered in its season of bounty: nuts and berries, mushrooms,  bark and pine needles. She went farther afield too, even into the town sometimes, to gather along the hedgerows and fields, and to buy milk and cream (she was desperately fond of butter), and a bit of flour, and tea leaves, and sugar. She bought her clothing there too, from the second-hand shop mostly, as she wasn't especially skilled with a needle. She was good with dyes, though; often what she bought was transformed with plant magic into joyously coloured frocks from the humdrum things they started as. Sometimes, her shopping done, she would even take tea in the little tea-room in the town centre. She would sit with her basket and patchwork bags under the table, looking out at the cobbles and shop fronts, blissfully enjoying her tea and cakes despite the covert stares of other patrons, and occasionally petting the cats that always appeared when she was there. Either she was unaware, or simply didn't care, that her frocks were considered outlandish, and her lack of hat and length of hair unseemly, and that every aspect of her appearance and behaviour and lifestyle mystified the good people of the town.

Whatever they thought of her and her odd ways, people did visit the witch occasionally. Sometimes if they were ill, they would send someone to bring her back to their houses, which put the doctor's nose out of joint entirely. She had helped to deliver not a few babies in the poorer houses, and a couple in the great houses too, when the lady in childbed had taken a dislike to the doctor. She was known to be good with herbal remedies, and good, too, at untangling hearts and minds. Somehow, after an hour spent by her fireside, chatting and taking tea, people felt their lives smooth out a bit, and they went home more comfortable than they came.

In another time or place, they might have shunned the witch, or worse. They might have let mystification run amok, and come to resent or fear her, and behaved badly. As it was, on the whole they let her be, with a touch of envy and a bit of head-shaking, but nothing harsher. It was easier, and safer, for her as she grew into middle age than it had been when she was young and lithe and a magnet for the eyes of men as she walked. Her lonely house in the wood was a refuge not just for her, but for any in need of a bit of patching up. If she herself was broken, it didn't show. Her body was growing a little creaky, but her soul seemed sound. Whatever sorrows might haunt her at times---as they do all living folk---didn't shake her essential wholeness. She was at home in herself and in the world. At times, when she laid her hands on someone's pain, there was a light on her face that seemed to shine from within. Children saw it, animals felt it, and the injured and grieving warmed themselves by it.

There is a grace that comes with wholeness, or perhaps wholeness is itself a grace. There is grace and wisdom in letting go, and in opening to receive, as trees do, as flowers do. It is beautiful to behold, and draws the broken beings to it, because that is the way the world works in its infinite wisdom and mystery. It is always wise to love what is different and whole unto itself, because it may have a medicine. What is whole contains the seeds of healing for what is broken. This is what the witch knew from looking at the world and living her life in her way, sound as a nut in its glossy shell: she was a part of the whole and thus unbreakable. Whatever happened to her couldn't touch the core of her; cracked or swallowed up, she was still part of the great wholeness. That was the source of any magic she had, and she knew it.

May we all find a witch's grace, soon or late.