This Adramyttium Earth

 

This Adramyttium Earth possesses no soul, so it seeks to devour ours...

 

Our uplifted gaze belies our truculent fixation within gravity. We dream of flight as if it is redemption, while all our waking day we show the soil the soles of our feet as they crease the craton, ancient and unforgiving though it may be.

Birds course through contrary winds for they are wind themselves. Airstream bodies flex hollow bones: a pivot of the head, flare of the tail, salute of the smallest pinion – all these carve an unseen furrow as though sculpting space. What beauty might that be… the inversion of a bird’s flight through air as polished stone?

High overhead they drift under the puffy evening clouds which part here to show an opaline blue, and there to reveal a tawny amber, stained glass windows into an eternal evening. The sky is as light as the heart’s mortality heavy.

Eternity receives our souls in as many ways as the rock hound unearths his minerals. A moment’s reach into a rocky brook retrieves a glossy serpentine. A sweaty dig continues for hours until the sharp ring of a shovel signals the unseen ore. We are collected tonight or tomorrow, mined in a minute or a month… or lifted one cell at a time from sand to star.

What we imagine is the flood, a driving irresistible force that smacks into us and we are never the same. What we experience is the rain, one drop at a time rinsing dust from flesh, flesh from spirit. We emerge transfigured unaware: that which was urgent and vital is nothing… that which was nothing is essential.

 

This is not our expectation; it seems not our nature. Indeed we are claimed but not owned by this Adramyttium Earth: to crush it and to be crushed, to bind it and to be bound, to release it and to be released.