#93 - I Write My Gratitude

I write.  Thoughts wish to pour out of me but I find it hard to express what I am seeing and feeling.  Emotions of fear and anger and hatred are so much easier to spew.  Very much like mental and verbal cholera.

I am seeing everyone and everything outlined in this… glow… this… shine… I finally asked my priestly brother and he sat and gazed at me and past me, closed his eyes and prayed hard enough that flickers of fire danced before his brow, breathing deep and slow and then smiling just as slowly.

I forced myself to sit and watch and not shove him into a carpet and roll him about the floor beating on him to put out the flames.  He laughed out loud when I said that to him.  “What doesn’t glow for you?” he asked.

The questions.  Goddess they never ask the easy ones.  Once I should have wanted to shake the sacred out of him… shake the fool who would be so in tune with his God that he… he would have let me shake him.  It wouldn’t have touched him no matter how loud I raved or foamed into his face.  That’s what I am feeling.

Even as I stand aghast and in awe of the whole world… don’t get me started on babies, kittens, puppies… young things… I am bursting into smiles and tears just looking at them.  Didara has had her calf… I am using this enormous baby’s back as a desk and she insists on rumbling laughter at me – in her baby pitch – every time she catches me indulging, watching her sacredness! The elephants hear this lightness I see as sound.  Fascinating.

I was with Didara when she gave birth.  How can something so big and so small at the same time emerge from an elephant that looks as uncomfortable as any female birthing?  Female.  Birthing.  I am no longer terrified.  The blood and the fluids no longer terrify me, no longer make me think of my own mother’s dissolving body on the floor of a dungeon.  My mother loved me and loves me and is either with the Gods, both male and female, or is off to another life, another creation.  There is more to the world than I can imagine, and I have a very fertile imagination, especially now.

How do I deserve this?  I am writing in the Elephant’s Orangery which is what this once riding hall is now being called.  There are more animals and children playing around me than I had ever thought to allow, ever in my life.  The cat.  The dogs.  The horse who is currently slobbering in my hair.  The elephants who are not animals but people, or they are as much people as I am an animal.  I finally understand that.

Limyé, my constant presence, is writing his own book, as I write mine.  The family are off working… Pelahir has taken his does and his stags and has gone off to meet the migration as it comes around the continent.  He doesn’t like being sedentary, but he likes being part of the family, so he splits his time.  I wonder how he does, how he is, in my world.  Has our paladin Ahrimaz saved him?  Held himself together to unravel the evil I did?  I hope so.

Teel shall be coming to question me about his next story idea.  I fear they have mined out all my odd ideas and innovations from my Empire, at least I cannot seem to come up with anything much new lately, as I watch people’s souls glow through their skins.  Arnziel just fell off his chair when I answered him.  “I even see rocks glowing, step-brother.”  Rocks.  I think the only thing I can look at without seeing its life, its blessedness is clear air and I’m starting to wonder about that.

The high priestess Mara says that I need to come to the Vale full time as the weather wanes towards the next winter.  This fall has been very warm.  Aeono the God has a fever and the world sweats.

My daughter is home from her studies and I am astonished at her skill with people.  She does not use truth-telling as a bludgeon, but a scalpel.  She smiles at me quite a bit.

I… am concerned about being a Lyrian priest full time.

I do not think I have the balance yet.  I have achieved a point where I will not punish my poor, suffering body for its existence and for its emotions.  But I don’t know how long that peace will last.  Who knows when the wheel of my thoughts will spin and I fall into hell once more?  Mara says that hell gets less hellish every time around.  I shall have to believe her.

Tomorrow.  Tomorrow I will put on the robe and go barefoot to Lyrian’s Vale and do the chores and listen to the supplicants who find me.  Feed the birds.  Rake the paths.

Thank you.  My gratitude for such peace is much bigger than my heart can hold.  Thank you.