words in the dust

Australian sandstorm

photo courtesy bigfoto.com

The earth remembers a time when its full soft heart bore the imprint of all that could be, when the textures and colors of present and past were not fixed. Perhaps that time is now, the moment of every moment.
I realize I know so little and understand even less. I have witnessed a footprint embedded in rock, the dance of potential reflected in the shape of the clouds and the stone at my feet. Who says it is not possible to bear witness to the unfathomable. We do it every day.
I received a letter from a friend I have not seen for many years, written in a language I no longer speak very often, yet is still in my dreams. We met in a city encased by a wall, carved out of time, where the buildings and people still remembered a war, bullet holes freckling the sides of the streets. It was a long time ago. Or perhaps not at all. Now the history of war has been replaced not just once, and new enemies shaped out of hatred and fear. The past and present reflect the same pain. Shaping a future of sorrow.
My friend and I have aged, though a decade still separates us, as does the ocean. But the sky has held us together, despite time and space.
My eyes softened, moist, as I read her words and she shared a glimpse of her life and family, other friends, still in that city, knowing that although paths can shift and separate and lives reflect a thousand facets we may never see, we all share a heart, we all share a birth. And we will all share a death. There is so much the same in our differences. This is what we offer each other. As solace, as support. For courage.
I am not sure I know what friendship is, as perhaps I once did. Perhaps it doesn't matter. Our lives collide, and we share our days with people we may not call friends, and yet they populate the space in which we define ourselves. And others, removed from that daily sphere, still send ripples across the stillness of our hearts.
My hair was bleached white, or dyed scalding scarlet. Now I wear a shaved head. Really it shows that appearance is all in the blink of an eye, even as I cling to it as a definition of self.
Memory is a room filled with shadows, that I try to recall, to sharpen. And I do. Is there yearning? For what? For nothing but a remembered fiction of what I believed was fixed. My life has proven that to be untrue. Nothing is. Even the idea of peace is elusive.
I write because it is an expression of that which I cannot define, the words are the sound of the swollen creek, relentless in movement. Never still. Sometimes a person, a moment, evokes in me the wish - the need - to be that stream, the sky, the cloud, reflected on paper.
Yet the paper will age and crumble and be swept by the wind and dissolve in the earth with the pounding of rain. And there will be nothing. Just the stillness of potential, future and past, and the shape of the earth as it clings to the sky, defining each moment through the eyes of all who behold it.