Wild Places.

[Guest guest]

Early morning in the autumn of this long years retreat. The

soft dwindle of moonlight caresses a limpid drowse of sun.

An unspoken composition hung in a love bruised sky for the

dreams of the lonely ones that toss in the bed of this starlit

dawn. All is Gods silence in my breath. I walk preexistent and

awake to the world, before the stirring birds of this pensive

daybreak, send the owls to their ghostly roosts, and break

the heart of night again. It is sheltered here in the hooded woods. My heart beats

thickly as I pull my path upon the solitary hill, tracking

itself to the tree-line, toward the denuded embrace of the

shadowed moors. Always unexpectedly the dark trees surrender themselves,

to the swath of unguarded plateau, that inscribes this

bordering between shelter and exposure.

The moor land looms out upon a tented heaven, a clamorous

wind greets me, as I gasp in the open and turning sky.

The heath stretches out its stark confront, a featureless

challenge, that bids me enter a pathless way. No comforting

mothers nature this, but a primordial invocation of air, rock

and heather, that waves in the howl of the winds free

wheeling riot and emptiness.

I am broken free and unmade, as the moors call me out

again, into the heart of this untamed land, to feel my bones

and flesh loosened in the dance of an ecstatic love that

claims my soul for its own.

These wild places are dream catchers that shred our

abstract cobwebs with a savage love. Man must walk alone

into them, to be stripped of the coat of himself, or forever

obscure this love in a shroud he has sewn from ambiguity.

We pass between the borderland of our phantom company

to be the emptying of the world. To rest in this aloness, and to walk into this nakedness, to

die to ourselves, this is the call of the wild places. They have

no mercy for blind travelers. Gods mercy is to ravish the

mind until it dissolves into submission. Jesus so loved this mercy

that he walked into the wilderness,

and never came back. For forty days he fasted from himself

to become the vessel of this love. He came through and

nothing returned with him. For he was uninhabited, a wild

place that lived only as this life. And so the moon and stars must blink out into an emptying

sun, in which the traveler abandons all hope of himself.

There in no room in the inn of this world for those who seek

safety. No refuge for the hearts awakening, but this step into

trust and absence. This falling into loves grace is a journey into an unfamiliar

land that is forever untamed by the comfort of beliefs. It is a

walk into a forbidding region that offers no direction for the

mind to compass. No sanctuary for the way seeking soul, but

this walk into the loss of an empty sun.

This wild light will illumine your heart when it shatters the

glass you hold before it. You will find yourself alone, and to

be this life of the world. The wilderness will blaze up in

your soul as a perfect garden of your life in God......

Whether you sit in the cell of being, or fall into natures

unfilled breast, you will find yourself in the wild places.

love

eric.

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All works and compositions found on the page submitted by

ErcAshfrd (AT) aol (DOT) com Are the Copyright of E. J. Ashford.

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