{part four to discovery}

Part IV: Brush with Death

~ Life and death. Lightness and darkness. Flowering trees and grave stones. A hill covered with a forest of fine outstanding trees. White pines and junipers. Elders and maples. Civil War battles, secrets, dead dreams, stories buried and hardships forgotten. All cradled under a canopy of watchful wizards, seers of all those things buried. Forrest Hill Cemetery.

The grounds keeper in those days lived in a stone cottage surrounded by blossoming crab apple trees. Baby pink, dark purple, dove white, all billowing like showy puffs of wrapping tissue at Easter time. How could there be so much beauty in such darkness? Does not the darkness have the power to swallow the life pulsing through the veins of those limbs? Her heart asked that question. Whispered it as she touched the tender shoots of early spring growth.

Flocks of young geese would amuse themselves as they watched mallards flip themselves upside down beneath the slimy pond water. The muted petals would float lazily on top, then sink like silver coins beneath the ripples created by the swans. Breezes would cast them unto the shady lawn decorating a grave site that had been forgotten by the world’s cares and tumultuous clocks. So simple, yet so perfect. As if the ashes of time were becoming one with the very nature that once breathed breath into its being. Giving back, decorating its creation. Righting it of all its wrongs. Forgiving it of all its trespasses. Calling forth peace, damning disaster of the heart mind and soul.

She realized then, even then at that age the complexity of life. That death, so forbidden, so hopeless and final was also a refuge, an end to loss, to fear, hopeful, lasting. An end if you will to unanswered questions, wishes, desires, and hopes deferred. She shuddered as she crossed the gate. That wrought iron gate, entrance to souls, and exit to everything striving, covetous and limitless.

Everyone dies, every flesh perishes. Whether it be the sudden plague brought on by disease of the mind or bones, or the sacrilegious quest for man’s unquenched ambition. All will come to an end. All will be as a withered blade of grass on the unchartered sands of human existence. So is life. So is its end. But there could not be death there. Not while she was there. Why did strangers look at her so as they walked along, tears like silver streams trickling down their faces? Maybe they knew. Maybe they could sense that life, love, and happiness if only for a moment had seen them. Out of grey green eyes, tender like spring rains. Cooling the bitterness, engulfing the heart as with a comforter, and embracing the forgotten triumphs, heralding throngs and forbidden loves.

She smiled at them with sad eyes feeling their pain as if it was her own. Taking on the burden of the lost and the living. Like a heavy brick, sawtering the chains of hardship into her mind. She understood, she did not feign to imagine. She suddenly saw the visions, heard the cries, felt the brokenness, abandonment and solitude of death. Like a honey bee finding its kingdom smashed by the paws of a jealous all consuming bear, so are the lives of this world caught in the throngs of its power and never ending quest for grandeur, status and recognition. All consuming, never to give back to its owner what it so rudely has taken -life, vitality, hope beyond all possible hope.

She should never be conquered by death. She would never experience its icy grip on her. Not in this world and not in the next. She was going to live. She was determined that no man or phantom, storm or disease would come and steal so precious a gift -a once in a lifetime experience to grow and weave her own unchartered, explicit loves, delights, hardships, and sea of tears. ~