Through the Pines

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

It was the sort of day when the sunlight itself is a shackle around her wrist. It's a day whose significance she doesn't want to remember, hard on the heels of another such. She'd feel less trapped if the light were gray, less hard-edged, with comfortingly familiar clouds hovering protectively.

Instead, the world is raw and exposed, like the soft golden wood of the piñon latilla lying castoff on the ground before the elements finish stripping it of its shriveled and weathered bark.

Better to focus on the latilla; its ghosts are much older, and therefore safer.

It's seen everything, of course — entire worlds that have come and gone, passing out of existence into the netherworld the silly and shallow creatures negligently refer to as history. They have no idea . . . .

Because the past is never past.

Nowhere is that truth more evident than here, beneath the light of this near sun. Oh, there are ghosts, whole worlds' worth, in the land where she is from: ancient ones whose now mostly invisible footsteps leave tracks ten thousand years old and more. Their prints speak and sing, of life, and love, and joy, and pain, and hope, and death, and a deep and abiding hunger that yet goes unsated.

But they are so old now that their willingness to touch the living in this world is attenuated, diminishing mostly into nothingness. They've seen so much that, like the great soldier pines of their own world, some of whom still live in this one, they now mostly watch, observant but detached. They know the folly of involvement. Still, they join the larger sentinels in their eternal watch; ever so occasionally, their spirits may yet be needed.

This place is likewise old, but newer in its recent ghosts. Their ruin still exists, mostly overgrown with chamisa and sage and the winds of a thousand years and more now, but she knows they still return sometimes . . . perhaps to pray, perhaps to dance, perhaps to set their descendants' affairs aright in spite of those unruly children's own behavior.

Perhaps to hear and feel the wind passing through the boughs of the ancient piñons once more, to hear its song.

Perhaps that is enough. 

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.