Sunrise

(Quite out of character, but I stayed up through the night to study. Usually sleep claims me by 1am but I felt troubled, with no inclination to shrug off my socks and climb into bed. To cut a long exposition short, I took a mat and sat out on the little balcony that overlooks some houses, hills and trees in the background, a thin line where a train sometimes runs rimming the edge of the horizon. Anyway, I was going to try to find stillness but instead I found my mind full of words. So I wrote them down.) 

When I was young I would dedicate three or four days of the year to watch the sun rise. It was my own ritual, quietly kept to read books whilst the world went dark and stars dotted the night. I would wait to see the sun rise. 

Now sunsets, oh they're glorius, thrashing wild beauties that sink gingerly into the night with the weight of the day on their shoulders. They're noisy and the song changes from cacophony to stillness. But give me a cool sunrise, the world waking up- again. 

The sky starts as a dark blue that fades softly, slowly. White but also every colour seeps in, bleeding into the morning. Lavender on the smoggy horizon, grey just by the distant outlines of pylons, rippled streaks of amber gilt the tree sihouettes. The morning songs are beautiful against the cerulean tipped sky. 

Even as your teeth begin to clatter involuntarily against the cool breeze that wraps your naked legs in goosebumps and the birds cry out at each other and the hadedas begin to screech, even as your heart feels restless because the world seems so so dark- it's ok. 

The day is new. Hope lives on. The dip in the darkness does not last. 

(My heart goes out to all those affected by the tragedies of terror. Not just Paris, but also Beirut, Nigeria, Syria, Lebanon and to any place that has been touched by the abomination that is hate masquerading as salvation. The day will be new, hope is as renewing as the sun. Sunrise will come, it always does.)

We are not like salmon, however much we try.

(The following is purely a creative piece and does not reflect any situation or person at any point in time)

I have a belly full of regret and a mouth full of words I've held back. My mind is steeped in fear, this fear of walking down a path I will grow to hate. And I am scared. So very scared that this feeling will never pass. I am a leaf tumbling in this autumn wind, moving with a will that is not my own. Those roots of optimism I was once anchored to, seem a fading memory of summertime. 

I find myself with no heroes, nothing to be inspired by and very little to emulate. Your voice gets hoarse if you are the only one singing the war cry above the melee of life. Your limbs tire from pushing against the current- we are not like salmon, however much we try. And finally your heart doubts, festering with indecision and questions, until it is changed irrevocably. 

I can only blame myself.

I always knew what my purpose was, because doing it made me happy and it felt the way birds must feel when they graze the heavens. It was a seed of an idea, a wisp of a beginning of what I wanted from this short time here. It didn't matter about money or material possession, which probably was the flaw in my idea. Happiness is an act  and it seems that ambition that is not materialistic is a goal for fools. And what I would give to be part of that troupe. 

Nothing would have happened anyway. I live by the book of rules and I will most likely die under its weight. Trying to deviate from this road, yet never touching the grass that lies beyond the lines that are drawn for me. The mind-made cage is ever-present. 

These colours of my soul will slowly drain away, washed pale by the waters I sometimes try to swim against.

Until nothing remains but duty.