True North

It's so important to me, this work.  These friendships I've made.  I've spent my entire life feeling like an outsider.  An anomaly.  Of mortal flesh and mind, yet so much more.  Sometimes I wonder, do they still think it a conceit when I say I'm an angel?  Or that I used to be?  Friends, please hear me.  I was once a bright, winged thing until I fell through day into night.  Through evening colours and into the sea.  There are parts of me still ancient and lucent.  I'm no better than any of you.  Just different.  And not really so different either, when all is said and done.

   Man was an angel too, once upon a time.  Winged brothers and sisters. 

   It's an awful thing to feel lonely in this realm.  But so many of us do.  We often feel unable to really share with others.  Yet we crave it so desperately.  In the same way we crave to help others, if we haven't yet slain our empathy.  Because if we can't really share how can we truly connect?  It's the lot of angels to live at a distance, I suppose.  To exist with certain abstractions.  Messages of compassion and service come before luxuries and comforts, but I'm grateful for those I have.  Here in the west we have an embarrassment of riches but often value too few of them.  Sometimes I think I'm more mortal than message now, yet the shine in me still feels so bright.  I'm not sure anymore, of the quantities of fire and flesh in my being.  But I don't need to be sure of most things.  Some things are eternal, and I have them.  I needn't say again and again what they are.  All else is mutable, changeable, subjective.  Like flesh and rock and spirit itself.  I can live with that, eternally.  It's not like I have a choice in the matter.  Nobody does.  The gift becomes a curse only when you can no longer imagine how to spend your time, or how to befriend someone in need.  Health comes and goes, and comes again.  Like youth.  Beyond this vale of tears.  Experience and experience and experience.

   Forever.

   So it goes.  With love, preferably.  Or in the apparent absence of love.  It’s an ugly, hideous thing when nightmare-wraiths steer human consciousness.  Altering our chronologies.  We need only open our eyes to see it.  War, terror and abuse.  Blood on the tracks of life.  Yours, theirs, and mine.  Hunger and deception – all tailored by these inverted feral psychologies.  Replacing our once beautiful minds with theirs.  Fractals folding, and burning.  But there is light here, still.  And laughter.

   And love.

   Ishkara still lives, in the heart.  She makes heroes of the brave ones even now.  When souls are seen, and hands held.  Kisses and rain.  Wisdom and light.  Beloved ones, don't let these wraiths convince you these tragic ruins around us are the only ways to live.  There are many ways and places, full of health and joy and sovereignty.  But first these tethers must be exposed, understood and broken.  Temet Nosce, the Kathari once said.  I should know.  I was there, in dreams.  Centuries ten.  Najaret, and hallowed hills.

   I've waited twenty-three years for this moment, and I couldn't be happier.  A seemingly endless night giving way to the light of new life.  At last.  Warriors, and rebirth.  Intent and action.  Here at the very edge of dreaming.  My Mother’s song, in grace.  My Father’s drums, in truth.  What a wonder it is to behold.  I know myself better now, because of the hard work of my brothers and sisters everywhere.  Missionaries of true kindness, and light.  Sometimes goodbye means giving thanks.  To say, “I really do love you, and I trust your maturity.”  Sometimes the bravest thing a guardian can do is let go, and step away.  Because wise ones earn their depths, and because our families and friends walk with us too. None of us reach those promises alone.  We share these burdens, don't we?  We share them gladly.  Saviours and the saved.  Who can tell us apart in the end?  We are what we love, after all.