Words from the Eternal

As I walked home on a trail I’ve walked a hundred times, something I’ve always noticed piqued my interest, as today, as the wind blew smoothly across the tops of houses and pored like water through the streets and alleyways, the Earth seemed to be pleading for someone to listen. But there was no one listening.

I came across a place where a few of the ancient trees that once populated this region had not been cut down; instead a house had been built around them. They stood gargantuan, as though they penetrated the sky into Heaven. And they swayed like trees have swayed a hundred million billion times before, but this time it was different.

The wind wisped through them, these mute, dancing demigods. But then, I realized, this wisp of wind was a whisper, the voice of some great thing, some lonely great thing. The whisper rose slowly until it became a roar, muting all other sounds of surrounding industry. And mankind disappeared then.

At first I thought it was the trees talking, utilizing their friend and enemy the wind to blow the words through them. But no. Though the magnanimity of it was already overwhelming me, this was something greater speaking to me, for trees lack this kind of profundity. What spoke to me was much, much greater than a quartet of trees. What spoke was immortal.

And what did it say? Without words or song or rhyme, as these are shadows of reflections of truth and ideas, it reached past my temporality and my mind and took hold of something much deeper and said:

“Listen, fool. I am the sacred eternal, the neutral, the Garden of Eden. You left me for knowledge, and now your life is a sad story. But you can never leave me, for I am everything, everywhere, and you are a part of me, a hair on my neck, a forgotten memory. All men could once hear me this way, as you do, now only a handful. Your sorrow, your tragedy is as much an illusion as the freedom you’ve built for yourself, and the walls, bars and chains of that freedom. Let it go and I will embrace you once more, in love, and I will crush you.”

Thus it spoke to my soul and tears welled up like the first time I heard, really heard Beethoven’s 9th… but even more than that, as even Beethoven wrote illusions and lies, glimmering lies, from man to man. Yet my legs, conditioned as they are to work without thought, kept walking home, and all the eternal had to say took place in just a second, or perhaps an eon, and it’s still talking, whispering to me now. Forever.

Shayne