Reflections from the Backwaters

How quiet the lake is this time of year... how still the water, bright the sky, and the stars, and the campfire, and the sun on the waves moving beyond the pines. And how sharp the pain, I wake to rediscover every clear morning, when there is nothing but calmness and stillness and a different sort of pacing to keep you from it. I may live in the hopeful future, or in the nostalgic past, in it's combined pulchritude and putrefaction.

I'd rather not live this way, but I've only found so many ways of changing it - stress or business or the dearest, brightest joys.

And something else has changed... I was watching the stars, and I wanted to drift off again. I could feel the heavens calling me, like times before when I've sat within myself and felt as though I was going off into the edges of the world, seeing the sand falling in Africa, and the rivers of Russia, and the Yellow Sea, and the waterfalls and parrots of South America, and felt rooted to the earth, and so inexplicably happy... this was blocked from me.

So I stop watching the stars, and I stop tending the dying fire, and I go inside and turn on Springsteen, and my mind whizzes off, buzzing with the imagination so strong this time of year. And I want to write... how I want to write... about the things that are important; like honour and bravery and love... not about the dust my own emotions have become. I can write and become something bigger than myself...

I'm not proud of my depression, you know...