His Power

This one was for the Reflections Contest, themed "Together we can". Read it all the way through before you react...

Cold. Cold seeps through me. An ice dagger pierces, paralyzes my thoughts, freezes them all. Only one falls still on my motionless mind, only one frozen shard of sentience. I can't. I can't, I can't! No more. I can't. This fact hammers the walls of my skull as my heart pounds the numbing cold through my body. And I shiver at the cold, at the dark it recalls to my heart. The dark that I see around me, that I glimpse every day in shadows behind tired eyes, in hollow laughs concealing weary hearts, in the lack of light in my peers. The dark that shines blackly out of crude words making black light of the most serious matters. The dark that devours any fresh innocence, and corrupts the common conception of those purest ideas beyond its reach. The cold dark looms over my mind, stirs my most hated memories, casts an awful shadow over me, cuts me off from that happy light, the warm innocence of child-like purity. That light I once knew, I once lived in.
But I know it still. I do, and I recoil from the darkness, that gross insult to the light I hold most dear. I recoil, but the darkness presses from every side. I have no escape. And I can't keep it from me any longer. I can't. No longer.
My inward scream of protest rips through my body, and I know my one voice of conscience is nothing to the world's great clamor of corruption. I am too small to the world. The great sky stretches to eternity beyond my window pane. I am so small.
Hot tears finally burst the bonds of my frozen eyes, and they shine in the moonlight. The cold blue light refracted in the drops on my eyelashes sparkles, a beautiful contrast to my thin inner wail of pain. Looking past my twinkling tears, I see the still night, the fall foliage silver in the night light, the distant clouds ringing the horizon, the low mountains gently rising out of sight. All untouched by darkness, though bathed in night shadows. And the great night silence joins my mental shout against the darkness. The silence silences the world's cacophony. The song of the birds joins the cry, and the roar of waterfalls, and the crash of thunder, and the howl of wind. And the voices of nature, united with me in triumphant tumult, overcomes the feeble cry of the world.
The cold blue moonlight still shines on my face, and warms me as it shows me the vast smallness of the world and the vast power of nature. And the moonlight banishes the darkness as I hurtle out into the depths of space, seeing in my mind the infinity which diminishes my time and space, the minutes and miles I know in life, to nothing.
And flying through the clear black between stars, I know I can. Because I am not alone. Beyond it all, beyond all existence I can imagine, is God, creator of all things, my Heavenly Father. His is the infinite power, the power of nature, the power of knowledge, the power of goodness human and divine; his power lights my world and his. And I can.

Eternity

Sorry for all the dark pieces lately. Second to last one, I promise.

I step blindly forward. I see only my feet. I know only now.

I cannot see behind me as I head forward, that which passed passing into the oblivion blocked by my skull. I cannot see it, I cannot know it, it cannot exist in me.

I cannot see before me where my feet plod on. The blows of my own thoughts force my head down. The path in front of me simply existing as slides into my view, as it throws itself under my circling feet. As it becomes my here and now, even as it is becoming my past. It does not exist as a future. I do not exist in a future.

I recognize only the reality pressing in upon me now: the sloping ground, the biting wind, the dimming light. All else, all past or future, blackness. No reflection of my singular light of being hits my brain. Nothing hits the light. Nothing. Only the here and now. There is no hereafter.

And yet, as level sod pass my void eyes as if they only ever had, as utter stillness caresses my skin as if it only ever had, I see, I feel another time. Deep in the recesses of my body, pain. And not that pain of lifelessness. I feel a tensed brow, that I no longer wear. I feel a ventilator draft that no longer blows. I see the face of my brother who no longer laughs.

And he lifts my eyes to meet the marble marred lawn, to face the rising sun, to acknowledge eternity.

Rushing Whispers

The voices in my head. The voices in my world. The voices trying to get there. How can I hear the difference between the sound waves. They wash through my brain, eroding what I knew. How can I see through the waves?

So many currents, pulling me apart, pounding on my mind, till I fall to pebbles. No foundation. No granite base. Just sand washing with the water, waves upon waves upon waves upon me. And who am I? What defines me? The voice in my mind, the voice in my family, the voice in my friends, the voice in my school, they build to the rushing roar, drown thought in their glistening depths, dissolve me in their monotone diversity.

I sink.

And I rise.

What breaks the surface, the mirrored veil keeping me under the waves? What glorious silence breaks the screams and wraps me in its peace? What grounds me, and from this firm foundation lifts me above the waters, the whispering voices, above myself? Or who?

Wishful Thinking

Something from the archives...

She scuffed along, pushing the fallen, dry, dead leaves out of their places to make way for her own procession. She looked down at the sidewalk, up into the trees, off into the clouds, anywhere but at the people around her. She didn't much fancy dealing with her fellow humans at the moment. She felt wishful.

In actual fact, she felt a fair bit more than wishful. She positively yearned. The emotion overcame her, pounding through her veins fiercer than acid. Every particle of her soul stretched, reaching for her dream. But it was not to be. Or it seemed that way. You see, what she actually longed for was passion, love, anything with a similar form. Love for a person, love for a subject, love for an idea, just love. She wanted that focused, oriented, purposeful feeling. Surety. Surety and joy. These feelings would surely motivate her, spur her on to accomplish something great, meaningful, lasting, profound, good. Surely. Right?

Unfortunately, her wishing remained her only emotion, dragging rather than driving her. Overriding any possibility for any other emotion to spring up in her at the moment. Ironic, this passion for passion defeated itself, in pushing out any other feeling including the very one she desperately reached for.

And at last another emotion began to flow under this torrent of dreaming: remorse. Remorse that she couldn't muster a nobler feeling, dream instead about serving others, helping them, doing good. She knew that this self-centered melancholy dreaming wasn't right, wasn't good.
And all at once, the mountain of her longing collapsed, the foundation eaten away by the repentant undercurrent. Exposed, a sincere desire to do good remained, a sparkling promise in the fall afternoon sun. And a pure fountain of hope began polishing this new drive.

Silence

The music in my heart cries out.
Oh for glorious release!
But stifled still, my stone ribs
Stop the breathless notes within.

My insides ache, my fingers itch
But only silence rings
As empty ears, and empty mind
Yet lack the notes to sing.

The unknown question, the unsaid word
Hangs behind the veiled air.
To opaque thought and formless moaning
Whirls my mind again.

I long to taste, to feel, to breathe, to shout,
To cry, to speak, to sing!
But only vacuum meets the prayers
That spacious minds will bring.

Contrasts

Hear the grasses rustle. Hear the very air stir. See the waving branches and swaying shadows. See the beautiful dance of movement and counterbalance. Feel the freshness infused in all the life around you, steadily seeping through you to your absolute core. Now open your eyes and face reality:
That dream holds no place here. Hustle and bustle and filth, this is their domain. Hear the multitudinous voices, shrill and shriller, the sound waves battering through your skull, your ears, your brain, crushing all thought and sentiment in their way. See metal doors slamming out sunlight, leaving wavering yellowed lamp rays in poor compensation. See around you only turned backs and cold shoulders, eyes averted ad downcast. Feel the grime encroaching, encrusting you with every touch of the door, desk, and dirty carpet. Slowly suffocating you with every breath inhaled.
See man's mighty marvels by the Lord's glorious works.

People

People. The concept is truly mind-boggling. That these bodies around me carry thoughts, pasts, futures, neatly packaged inside their own skulls. And in those skulls, worlds as vast as mine, universe upon universe upon universe within a few cubic centimeters here, another few there, and a paltry few here, ringing between my ears. Worlds without number. Unfathomable. The intertwines, the overlaps, the skips, the foibles, the misconceptions, the false perceptions. The power. The shock waves caused by single thoughts, single actions, single words. The motives, the buildups to cataclysmic events. Each life a drop of water on a smooth pond, radiating ripples and repercussions until the pond foams, rushes, leaps its bounds. Until the pond is nothing more than a blur of movement and imperfect reflections.
And outside it all: reality. Separate, divided, distinct from its flat reflection in inner space. And yet inside it all, incorporated in everything; living, breathing, growing in the wavy perceptions of tear drops on mirrors, in the ringing thunder of silence, the intangible reality.

Goodbye

The memory of a memory
like the echo of an echo
is useless as the word
Forgetting now forgotten.

Wild Blue Yonder

Blue. Baby blue. Electric blue. Powder blue, sky blue, aquamarine, sapphire, azure, navy, teal, turquoise. Blue. But this blue was different. This wasn't just a color. The blue above, framed in whipped and billowing clouds, this blue extended beyond. Beyond me, beyond my life, but not beyond my joy. My joy extended, transcended everything. It washed over and through everything, like the mighty sweep of a tidal wave. And it washed in everything, lacing through the pious arteries of the universe. It swirled with the great pulsing blue above me, the sky alive. My joy, alive in the vital exalted space. The blue. His eyes were blue...

the diagnosis

No. No. A horror of the black empty void of her future made her cry out No. No! The silent scream of her soul drowned out all--all memories, all past, all present, all reality--all, except the blank prospect presented to her now. No. No. She recoiled from the brink of this bottomless cliff. She refused. She would not! No. No!
Stage four cancer. Six months. No. No! Not her brother!