Tonight

Tonight, as I listen to the storm rage against the mountain and the forest and the trees in the street and this house, my heart is sore.

I wrote down my usual prayer for peace this afternoon, in my morning pages book, at Seattle Coffee, Cavendish. But it's the first time I prayed it this week.

Perhaps I've lost my way these last few days, allowing myself to be distracted from my path, the one I've chosen to tread, albeit a lonely one at times, on the road less travelled.

A peaceful path though, one of simple and minimalist contentment, joy.

Wind howls, thrashes itself against the roof, which are the walls of my attic home. So loud that at times I cannot hear myself think, causing me to clench my jaw and teeth, and to furrow-frown my brow.

Opening myself, and my heart, to strangers; tying up my soul in knots with theirs, and theirs.

Life of years has taught me to keep the door only slightly ajar, allowing a mere few through.

To pick and choose carefully.

To rather sit alone at the fire, with my cat on my lap, than with a crowd at the feast.

To bed early, to rise early, to give thanks on my knees before the sunrise.

To listen to the wisdom in the wind. To count my pulse, and to know that I am alive.

Autobiographical prose?

He's lying on his bed now wearing just a pair of sleep shorts; an arbitrary pair of sleep shorts. 

He sat aimlessly on the large faded red leather couch downstairs. Choked on Twitter. Ignored the disconnected Tv. All that was constant was his aimlessness, his hard-clenched jaw.

He walked purposefully upstairs, the wood creaking unconsciously beneath each rubber-heavy tread of his slip-slops. Made-in-China. He was saying goodnight wordlessly to the house and to his lover in the room below. Grimly. Steadfastly. This could have been the script for a suicide walk. But it's not.

He had contemplated a walk on the road along the coast edge. There the verdant vegetation, on both sides of the road would have sucked his night focus upwards and into the star crusted night sky, and his night hearing to the bashing and sliding of the ocean below. 

Instead he walked into his room, removed his old black vest, swiped cursed flees off his ankles and kneeled at his bedside. Where he quickly, unceremoniously prayed. God I can't do this on my own; this is a space that I do not know. I don't know where to next; I'm at my end.

The black cat with the snub, short nose watched him in silence. As he got up clawing at his ankles and searched for the almost empty bottle of plastic-tacky insect repellant, before lathering it on his hairy legs, his hairless ankles and his long, slender feet. 

Crickets and frogs, raucous, outside. The cranky whirr of the dilapidated fan. The welcome wind rolling, flurrying through the house; it was a sticky, ugly 33 degrees centigrade today.

Sitting down on the double bed he slipped the case off his iPad, touched it on, opened Safari and deleted the entire block-full of words that had failed to describe his blog. He replaced them with one semi-sentence. At the top.

man with a beautiful mind.

He remembered, again, that the putting down of words is therapeutic. And that they are for no-one but me.