The There There

In the evening, I go to the channel to see the water, when the sun sets and the danger time; when the dark Empty hunts me. I go there for end day reflection. A ritual preparation for the long hours to come, a prayer for safety and sanity. Sometimes the vigil lasts all night, all long empty damn night. Sometimes, I can nearly hear It, scratching on my door. A slow scrape like the caresses of a hard-cold corpse. There is no refuge, only the escape of oblivion, sleep in snatches or stupor sold at sad cost. Even in the company of good friends, when my brightness burns bonfire hot and I am animated and quick, large, sharp and penetrating, It comes; taps my shoulder and reminds me that I do not belong here, that I have no home to go home to, that I live at the end of a leash; held by the dark Empty.

Looking over the channel, I spotted the rock-still Heron. He blended so well with the darkening that only by his reflection, his shadow on the water mirror, from the last-light sky, did I notice his presence. Some things can only be seen by their shadows. Unmoved he stood, as if he had been there long before and long after to come.
I like looking at water. It always fascinated me. The patterns of playing wavelets, the ripples and ruffles. The tiny whirls, water dervishes spinning languid, in and out of time, appearing and leaving. The long undulations of waves born by boats. The flow of deceptive tidal currents, fast and insistent, or the held-breath stillness of a silver-sheet surface-hush. I wonder of the hidden landscape that shifts the flow and causes these effects on the impressionable body of the water. Some things can only be seen by the effects they cause.
The water is my mind and my mine. I dig here for the lustrous glimmers from which my writings are constructed. Weavings of ruby hopes and diamond insights on a gold thread cloth of words and metaphor. Some things can only be understood by metaphor, never directly, but by the long, long way around, with the gaps as necessary as the There there.