In Alaska, everything is beautifully backwards. One expects water to ripple and wave as the wind tosses it back and forth. Yet, in wintered Alaska the sea sits still and mute while the sky swirls and sings in alien colors. The line between land, sea, and sky is fogged beyond that which can be discerned by human eye or intelligence. Blue ice is inverted upon opaque skies. Ivory islands float haphazardly between sheets of white pastels that have been smudged and shaded beyond recognition. Time is kept not by the everlasting darkness nor the shackled sun, but by the rhythms deep within our beating hearts.
It is every place that is familiar, it is every place that is foreign. It is the wild light we have always longed after, it is the wild darkness that has always frightened us. It is the time of our first awakening, it is the time of our first slumber.
In shock we have discovered that our beauteous land is deplorably fierce and feral.
That which should infuse our hearts with awe instead fills us with terrible desperation.
Somehow the land that first demanded our love thus turned to break our spirit. The quiet isolation we once worshiped faded into an unfathomable desolation as the winter fell around us, and even still we wonder how such a thing can be. It seems there are things in this world which are meant to be only temporal; short seasons of inexplicable impossibilities. We can never truly belong here for this place was not shaped for us.
And so we learn that creatures of the Light should not live within the interminable Dark. Though a vast prison of ice threatens to keep us perpetually bound, it is strictly the memory of Light which pulls us through the December country.
*published in The Mensokie, June 2010 Edition (Central Oklahoma Mensa)
No comments:
Post a Comment