Quintessence

There is in this life a beauty
In every grain and every strand
a rhythm. Quintessence.
Beyond the known, magic awaits
Beyond the seen, mystery unfolds
And for one moment
motion abates, silence consumes
When all is lost, and all
at last, is clear.

I Think

My mind has been cluttered for a few days, shifting from one thought to another. Even the dreams are beginning to mingle between themselves. I recall one in which a dozen men sat around a large oval table and discussed what they called ‘evacuation’ of all Jews from their so called purist race, giving me chills even in my sleep. I remember opening my eyes to realize that it was only a dream and then I remembered something like that happening in a film I had seen not too long ago. I was furious then but the same realization in the dream appeared far more frightful. Later my heart ached even more realizing that it was neither a dream nor a script from a film but rather a smeared black history itself.

Hearing the sound of a mild snore coming from my dog close by, I went back to sleep, thinking now of a story I had heard before. A boy in his teens was abused physically and mentally by his cruel drunken father most of his life. The mother on the other hand did everything in her power to give her child the love he was denied from his father. A few years later, the mother passed away and at the funeral the boy remained quiet and somber but there were no tears in sight. The father lived a very long time, passing away when the boy was himself in his sixties. At the father’s funeral, he cried with no end in sight, the tears flowing uncontrollably. I woke up wondering if people need such pain in their lives to have a reason to live.

Leaving the bed with sleep in my eyes, hair all over the place, I took the dog out finding myself suddenly staring at the shafts of morning light streaming through the trees, the dappled shifting shadows, the mist rising off the silent grass. We walked, feeling the scent of purity resonating with authentic power. While the dog sniffed around, finding another territory to mark, I noticed several bees hovering over a bush filled with yellow spider like flowers. I saw one who seemed glued to the center of the flower, the wings flustering rapidly as if the bee was far too excited having found something she desired. Another one just hobbled from one flower to the next, unable to decide which one to settle on.

Back inside, I sit with a pot of tea, looking at the forest and seeing it drizzle again, as if defying the sun. There are no clouds in sight, sharp sunlight streaming through the trees yet a mild drizzle. My mind wanders to my recent experience living in a big city for a while and compares it to the serenity before my eyes. Some would say that the city changes constantly while this forest would remain the same. I found it just the opposite. The city remained the same in my experience, different people yet the same sounds, the same activity repeating itself. This verdant land somehow shows signs of change all the time. There is indeed a sense of constancy, one hardly forgets the quiet nature of rural life, yet the experience varies even with the time of day. One day’s walk through the forest is entirely different from another day’s. A solitary walk along the beach at night with the chilly wild gently running itself within you remains one of its kind. The next night doing the same walk is somehow just different. My own experience of being here is one of being ‘alone’, and as much as I am beginning to crave city life once in a while, I remember having a sense of being ‘lonely’ in spite of the rush of a major urban setting.

Images after images, the unfinished canvases sit with a story of their own. A boy walks on the beach playfully. In his tiny hands he holds some sand he desires to take home. A total sign of distress soon appears as he watches the sand slip away. The harder he tightens his grip the less sand remains in his hands. Quique runs through the field chasing his butterfly. Time after time he falls to the ground unable to catch it and just once when he was able to he sits there stern, fearful of the fact that he might crush it he finally catches it. I see and hear all these images and more, calling me at times but I wait for something within to show a sign of its own.

After days of mist, drizzles and cold chilly mornings, the sun rose today like a gift - an invitation to get out and live. I shower and dress in pure white cloths and walk to the nearby village. On my way I walk thru some old ruins, images of ancient churches rushing through my mind. Reaching the village I notice the decorations and sparking little colorful lights, the smell of freshly baked cakes and puddings fills the soul with authentic bliss. The heart just dances away to the gentle music that settles all around and I think. I think.

There is a song....

A private spell, an incantation. He wishes to tell him that he knows what he had known all along; that one day this world will burn down from the love it cannot bear. Fire will reduce flesh to bone and bone to ash, ash to smoke and smoke to air: this is how we shall all go.

The song is whole and wondrous and it alludes to the truth that there are mercies in life so small and humble that they will break you more easily than the cruelties ever could. Now a crimson colored butterfly quivers past him. In a reverie a man touches his neck and he acknowledges his gesture in the flattering amber colors around them. The recherché idiom of lovers. He steps out of his caress and into the garden, where the wind moves through tall pines, a haunting, old colored sound. Where is this place? Where the sunsets are dazzling, but the dawns even better. He has made it here…… a bird calls out from the trees. The horizon empties its dark secrets and the sun, slow but sure, sends up its coruscating flares.

The sudden lightness in his chest he cannot name, and he cannot deny. All he knows to be true is this: there is a song, an evening song, which when you take to the great and old mountains will return no echo. A melody released with a volcanic contralto, it rises up and reaches far and it touches the bluebells hiding and the weasels and the smallest harvester ant that ever breathed. But it returns no echo. Of course, the ear, small and without the necessary wisdom, presses against the crepuscular radiance and hunts out some kind of ricochet. But this song, this last song of dusk, now it demands no reply nor permits imitation simply because it is full in itself: a breath that will never be breathed again. All things under its bough will be healed and returned to the place they came from: silence. There is a song, an evening song, which when you take to the great and old mountains, will return no echo.

There is a song.

BLEU

I fell in love with the most unlikely of all people. At first, he seemed so ordinary, someone I would have not given a second glance, but the moment he looked in my direction, I could feel the energy that pulled me towards him. I walked towards him with no will of my own, my knees buckling as if the ground had suddenly shifted right under my feet. As I got closer I could feel the presence of every fragment of his body. Staring in his mysterious eyes, I knew then and there, that nothing else mattered or had any significance other than my being with him. He stood there without saying a word, looking back at me with such affection that I almost felt faint, as if his very presence had the power to drug me and carry me into a state where reality and fantasy had no distinction. As I struggled to support myself he appeared exactly in the position my hand unknowingly reached. With almost complete confidence or maybe some sort of blind faith, I allowed him to lead me slowly away from the crowd. Resting my shaky right hand on his shoulder, we moved in complete silence with only the sound of his heartbeat that seemed to have traveled in mysterious ways to no matter where my hand touched him. He glanced at me as if to assure me that everything would be all right but I had no thoughts other then the burning desire to remain completely under his spell. I felt so in sync with his presence that I could hear all his thoughts, binding me so close that I questioned my very own existence.

He called himself Sky, as if to signify the role he had to play to protect me from the unknown world beyond. With his strong arms around me, he half carried me through the crowd that appeared to be as if in a silent movie. I couldn't even feel my breath, leave alone my pulse, just the energy that surrounded me and his majestic embrace. Reaching a dark alley in what seemed like an eternity, I felt myself being carried in his arms up the stairs. Something kept pulling us up through the well with such force that all that remained below appear to dissolve to nothingness.

"Hey", I heard myself mumble, but my mind had drifted so far in the distance that I could barely remember who I was. Only the sound of his heartbeat and the echo of my own voice kept me from drifting into a deep sleep.

"Who are you?", I asked in a faint whisper, a question I really desired no answer to.

"Sky", he whispered back in a voice so familiar it sent chills through my body.

"I am here to open your eyes", he continued, "to show what you have been afraid to see."

Without any sense of place, I felt myself floating in some sort of timelessness, his firm grip keeping me stable as we continued moving higher and higher. Struggling to maintain any sense of balance, I could feel nothing but the presence of thick fog that made the ground appear almost fluid. Waking up in what appeared to be a dream, I found myself lying in the middle of an open field, the silky white sheet barely covering my androgynous body. Sexual desire so intense that I felt a struggle to even open my eyes in this dreamy state. I could feel his soft hands caressing my body, pushing me deeper and deeper into a world where joy and sadness were one and the same. Through the corner of my eyes I tried to focus on the surroundings until my vision fixed on tiny little sparkles of stars rising from the plants at the edge of the field. Dozens of baby stars rose from the plants and in slow motion moved toward the vast sky.

"Let go..", I heard him whisper again, "..of your ego, and you will go beyond peacefulness to eternal bliss".

His breath so close to me that I could feel goose bumps all over my body. Bewildered, I watched the stars rise beyond reach and stand still above for a split moment before diving down towards some distant land.

I turned around to look back in his deep eyes and saw the reflection of my own memories.

" Make a wish", he muttered as if reading the mind of the child sitting on the back porch, staring at the falling stars in complete silence, but only this time, the silence was like one that prevails on snowy mountain peaks, with a cool crispness where I could hear a song that carried me to the innocent within me.

Wish..., I had none, just the one that had already been fulfilled, and that too without my even asking for it, to be in this state and experience the perfect balance of joy and pain I felt right there and then. He had carried me into another dimension, one that merged comedy and tragedy together and made them a varied reflection of the same thing, where death and life instantly led to one another and one disappointment led to another opportunity so swiftly that the mind remained cleansed of any worries, with simply the sound of joy and sorrow merging perfectly that it freed my soul to a silent dance.

He leaned forward and kissed the side of my neck, his fingers touching my face with such gentleness that I felt being brought back ever so slowly from my deep sleep. I reached out and held him, tightening my hold as I pulled him closer to my body until our minds and souls felt almost one. As his hands moved gently waking all parts of my body, I opened my eyes just as he closed his. Laying there in total bliss, with a sweet lightheadedness and throbbing heat passing through every vein of my body, I saw a multitude of stars rising from within us and get consumed by the majestic sky, and all that remained behind was bleu.

I don't know the reason why or how he happened to appear in my life and leave as swiftly as he came. Maybe he was a figment of my imagination just as much as I of his. As severe as the pain remains losing him, the joy for having known him in one twilight moment makes it all so clear. Maybe his purpose was to remind me to always look up at the sky and be grateful for what life has to offer in the present instead of what it could be in the distance beyond anyone's control or even imagination.

You know how it is when you listen to a beautiful piece of music, some thing that you really love, it penetrates every nook and corner of your being. Even when the music stops playing and you walk out on the moist grass and let your mind observe everything, appreciating things just the way they are, loving your surroundings unconditionally and not thinking of the emptiness that made you feel separated from everyone.......and then suddenly, you hear the same music playing faintly within your self, in tune with every single heartbeat.

That's how I feel when I think of my Bleu Sky.