The Road to Damascus

I.

My mind turned to magic before I could write, and so we relied more on my ability to create than to record. He taught me the sounds of happiness, and I found the joy in all things as he did. Golden days and moon-lit evenings filled my mind to bursting. I made everything I could, and set free the fruits of my mind, if they had a  mind to go--we all reveled in the song and the sweat of our labors. Summer is long, but cannot last forever. Things are made, they ripen, and they die--this is the oldest pattern. There is nothing like the first shiver of fall.

II.
I learned the song for everything else when he left. When my mind was a long way off, the wood and the clearings of stars and grass made themselves known--it is lonely, but clear. It is impossible to know light if you know nothing of darkness. In rage, and then misery, and then mere sorrow, I learned to lose as surely as the trees go to sleep, doused by the wind. When the sun rose once more, I learned that light will always find a way, and that the things I had learned had not left me because the one who taught them had. There would always be a leave-taking, but leave-takings are still beginnings, in their own way.

III.
Belief is strange. The more you think about it, the less it makes sense. I've been many things, but I've never been a scientist to divine the measurements of being; never one to order them in odd ways that others may understand and require--but the patterns are there. They've always been there. Nature orders itself. We are merely here to reflect what is given, in whatever form suits best.

It's important to hold onto the old feelings--the pure names of things, the sounds in your head that no else hears when you experience water on your hands, or sand, or stones; the ideas from the touch of willow leaves pricking your face as you walk through them and the murmurs from the still pond in the woods behind your home. Sometimes, the old woods give the best words. Sometimes, you just need to throw language a bone. String together beautiful things and the world will shift with your sound. 

For the Scriptic prompt exchange this week, Michael gave me this prompt: "And sometimes ... it almost seemed to him, that he ought to be happy." -Heinrich Von Kleist. I gave Grace O'Malley this prompt: Stained, orange, light, lizard, voracious, soft - use these words or be inspired by them.