David Eagle dot Net

Solace.  I don’t seek it out of a need for comfort, or protection.  It’s not out of a desire to escape, or avoid the world.  Sometimes, I just need to be in that place of endless summer mornings and long footpaths, where the trail is both known and a mystery, where there is a journey of discovery taking place around each bend, but I am innoculated against the dangers of the unknown, as  children are…to a point.  It’s that point, that knifes edge realization, that gives us our first taste of adulthood.  There are things in that dark wood, things that kill and destroy.  Things that reap ruin.  The realization cuts, and it sets us on a path of growth, all purposeful.  Uncover the things in the wood, know them, explain them, reason with them or subjugate them, so that they cannot destroy you.  So that they cannot bring wrath.  These wrathful wraiths.  In our journey to own the wood, to dispel the darkness…in our battle, we make the monsters that we fear…real.  We give them power over us, not by running from them, but by trying to defeat them.  We legitimize them by creating battle plans.  Our natural state, our childlike fearlessness, perhaps it’s a bit more reckless, a bit less thoughtful, than an adult ought to be, but it’s also impervious to the shadow-creatures.

So I look for Solace, a land of my own, where the woods are free of sinister creatures, and the shadows are never so heavy that they do more than dapple.  Each curve in the trail is a discovery, and nothing dangerous lies beside the way, waiting in ambush.  In this summer country the wind and sun do not shine and blow, but caress.  The smell of the earth is sweeter, here, and the turmoil of my days, with it’s shadowy wraiths, fades.  Under an old oak, beside a creek, I’d take off my shoes and let the grass grow up between my toes.  I look for this state of mind…Solace, and I find it here, in writing. 

Once I’ve found this state of mind, I can look at my day.  With it’s ups, and downs, and confrontations and confusion, and take them all as part of the whole.  Take that whole as a very small part of a greater picture.  In this way, I might learn, as Rudyard Kipling says, “To meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same.”

Perhaps it wasn’t as good or as bad as my aching shoulders are telling me it was.  I carry my tension there, the weight of my cosmically insignificant world, and at times they protest…but they’ve got no perspective. They have no summer-country rich and vivid, no place to stand and look at the whole picture and know that, today, more was built than was destroyed.  They’re liars, but what they lack in understanding they make up for in ferocity.