No Title, Just Mess

              

               There is a pond in the deep corners of the forest in my hometown.  It's crystal clear water has beckoned many a traveler to this edge of the world, yet none of my family will go near it.  This pond is very old you see and it's made up of all the earth's secrets.

               Everything that once was and is can be found in this pond.  Ebola learned to kill as it rested on these rocks, waiting for its next prey to come along.  Trees drank from this water until they were no longer trees but a mix of flesh, blood, and terrible knowledge.  Every disease that ever scourged the earth was born here, including the deadliest one of them all - man. 

               But everything has its beauty and this pond knows that better than anyone else.  Magnificent flowers, with colors so rich they blind kings, blossom in rings around here.   But touch them and all the years of your life will fly off your skin onto its eager petals, for beauty has its price.

               My people dare not come here.  We have learned first what this pond is and what it can do.  This pond is life in all its many treacherous forms and yet there are those who believe they can challenge it. 

               They come in droves with their swords and their vain thoughts hoping to be the first to bend nature to their will.  Their corpses now rot with magnificent purpose; birds and maggots alike feast on this buffet of egos.  Mother Nature leads her children one by one past these decaying carcasses of men; She slips whispers of their weaknesses into waiting ears.  For this pond is also death.

               Now I wait.  I sit by the cool waters, dipping my toes in with carefree abandon as though we are old friends.  I hear the mysteries of the world as they are sung by the leaves.  I feel the raindrops wash away years off my skin and I welcome it with open arms. 

               For even life and death needs their keeper.  I will sit here and learn all I can about this pond, as old as the earth, and it will drink from my youth so as to never forget the cruel jokes it plays on us.  In exchange for this my people are allowed to live freely without worry or regret that their mother will turn on them. 

               The only way we know death is how we know life - as a dear friend who takes us to the next journey.


p.s. Another ghost encounter, I woke up this morning and my kitchen door was closed and locked.  I never lock it, not to mention it's one of those flimsy locks you find on bathroom stalls, sort of a fake deadbolt.  The point is they are hard to move (also because no one uses them they tend to rust) and I've never even thought about locking my kitchen.  But as I went to go get breakfast started there my door was, locked.  Go figure.