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.

Starling Drives Out the Ghosts of Day

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

A starling sits, atwitch, upon an old dead branch of a tree on the ground, his feathers ruffled by the water in which he has just bathed himself. He twitches and turns some more, looking vaguely indignant and more than a little cold and unhappy as the wind riffles through the layers of his wings.

He's a beautiful bird, all bright pencil-yellow bill and iridescent robes, with a short sharp voice like a clear crystal bell.

She was always told that starlings were nasty birds, dirty, something to be chased off, not welcomed in.

Now, she can welcome them, feed them, invite them to stay.

Sometimes, it seems that all she need do is the exact opposite of what she was ordered to do as a child, and she can be sure it's the right thing.

Linking Worlds

"Linking Worlds"
Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

She wants to know the ghosts.

She wants to see them, finally, to hear their stories, to understand what this world was to them when they were here.

Not that she believes they will depart if she does. They are, it seems, inseparable from their places, with little desire to wander elsewhere. And in truth, that makes perfect sense; she comes from a people whose existence, whose identity, are bound up inextricably with place, and the world of the afterlife, though different, is yet the same.

Perhaps that's true of most ghosts, even those whose lives were amputated from the lands from which their ancestry arose.

She doesn't know quite why she suddenly feels compelled to see them. It presents a distraction, of course, a diversion from her own ghosts who have haunted her throughout her life, ghosts whose behavior while alive afforded them mostly no right to any claim on her thoughts. They refuse to let go, but she's tired, and she's made a conscious decision to ignore them. Let them weep and wail, scold and scorn, gnash their teeth and rattle their chains; she has armored herself against them, cautiously, carefully, but finally, and she has purposely turned a blind eye and deaf ear.

And with that turn, she saw and heard the others.

She wonders whether these are the beings that she has felt with her at times throughout her life: in sleep, awake, in that netherworld between the two states of being. The sounds and sensations, the glimpses and voices and feelings that have surrounded her nearly everywhere she's lived, save for school dormitory housing and a few modern-ish apartments. The land surrounding them, of course, is another thing entirely, but the newer buildings have never felt alive with other spirits as the old ones have.

She is leaving her own ghosts behind.

It's a time to visit other ghosts. 

It's a time for linking worlds. 






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.