Stay

While sitting on the edge of the stairway that leads to the darkness, a question beckons from below.  Wise questions come from the darkness, often during the most challenging times.  Or when facing the inevitable descent into the longest nights, while bracing oneself for what will come.  Winter.  Rolling in slowly now as Autumn’s Queen paints the colors of her knowing across the land.  Trees shedding their garments of Summer as easily as birds fly away, leaving us to face the cold without their sweet songs. 

This is when the darkness muses a thoughtful contemplation.  Why do you stay here?  Why are you bound to the forest and these mountains that are so old, craggy and unforgiving?  What bids you to continue to pull your cloak tighter around you, to walk over rocks and through greenbriers?  What is it about these broken and battered lands that holds you to them?  Why do you not just take to the road and run?  Your blood is cool, your soul craves the sun, your heart is a mermaid’s heart, interrupted.  The edge of the world inside you seeks oceans of crashing waves and the unknowns underneath.  In your dreams you are floating and held by the tides, your feet are bare and scrubbed clean by a thousand grains of sand, the sky folds itself over the sea before you, and you look beyond the world to the end of it.  Yet here you are.  Earthbound.  Smelling of dirt, fir and moss.  Here you are stepping over salamanders and stalking deer as if you could lie with them in the woods and listen to the squirrels tell stories about each other and the trees.  Here you are, where the ravages of the land leave scars behind that cannot be healed.  Here you are held by little giants that have fought those ravages in order to grow, to reach for the sun amongst the fallen bodies of their own ancestors.  The blood of ages and extraction stains this land.  There is a hardness to it for sins not forgotten, for eons that cannot be recovered.

Because I’m from it, I suppose.  That’s my answer.  Because I was born unto this space and so it is a part of me.  Because I came from somewhere within it and therefore, I understand it.  Therefore, I respect it.  Therefore, I need it like air.  To be cradled by the weeping trees, huddled together tightly as if they are sheep in a storm.  Stretching this way and that, entangled within one another, sprung from the battleground of greed and gluttony.  To be offered solace from limestone hollows and whispered to by water finding its way over rocks.  To know that deep below the surface of this place, there are caves of excess and hurt and that they must feel like the tatters in my own heart, aching and forever understanding that for some things, there is no healing potion.  To marvel that despite all of this, those trees still reach for the sun and the land still gives to the creatures that walk upon it. 

And with my answer given, I stand and begin my descent.  Down the winding staircase that leads to the Solstice.  The darkness waits for me there, where I will build a fire and bide my time.  Winter will rage, the world that I know will rest.  The trees will sleep, and I will offer what I can to help those that still stir.  And one day, when my eyelids flutter open, a robin will sing and Spring will call me home.

photo by West Virginia State Tourism