Eddies

The morning began quietly. I woke before the birds, before the sun, and pulled my lean-to shelter to the shore of My River to serve its second use as raft. With the cup of my hands I drank from my river and splashed its water to clear the night's earth-bed smear from my cheeks. My final raucous heave woke my attention to the tentative whispering whistle of many small bird-voices and the soft glow of dawn's entreaty for day.
I clamber over the edge of the raft and dig my fingers into the clefts of two pairs of logs separated by the span of my arms, my face turned upwards to the brightening of gaps in My Great Forest Canopy. An aggressive wind assures me of the coming storm, but I am comfortable in the judgment of my downstream journey's brevity. So in this moment in my forest, as with so many others felt since my joining it, I wait and drift...

An Early Soul

The midday sun reaches its fiery peak as I draw a last sweet breath of easy air on the hilltop. I stumble a bit on my first step; making my way down the rocky hillside a perilous, though perhaps not entirely ungraceful, headlong scramble. The stony earth begins to even out as the shady boughs of the impending forest gain level with my eyes. Between my footfall and that shady place, puffy white forms dance to the rhythm of my bouncing heels and toes. The flock is soon a river on even land to be run between, so thus I continue my mad pace past the bleating, grazing crop of wool and tame my wild storm of pedal motion to a gentle rustle against the fern-furried forest floor...

In the ages of Earth before my birth into it, there have been as countlessly many risings of powerful men and man-thoughts as failings of ideas and civilizations. In this, my present, I see a great number of things which frustrate my individual will and shame my human spirit. The counting of these makes no dent in the sense of hopelessness about their confining mass. Ignoring the tragedy of our flawed society gives only a shallow and transient peace, but I have come to believe that there is little to be done for it save the tending of my own spirit in defiance of all that contains it. To that end I will write these threads of imagined lives stripped bare of modern woes. I hope that many, including some who would not take well to a plainer description of my views, will appreciate them as moments of both peace and vigor unbound by time.