My Precious Cathartic Black Smudge.

I once knew a young boy obsessed with stuffing the world into his pocket. Yet, the more he seemed to put together relative to the world around him, the less he seemed to understand. Something akin to “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” (The truths in SW continue to blow my mind.)

The ‘means’ for ‘sorting’ issues in one’s life is very great. Without a still, turning ‘A’ into ‘B’ simply will not happen; regardless of all the wishful thinking one can muster. Beyond this, person to person stills are nearly unrecognizable. Our boy from above found his in digging about in the dirt much like one’s half mad neighbor woman, Beatrice; yet had that tid-bit not just been reveled, the world would be none the wiser.

At a time, my personal still was black; much of her seemed very mechanical…but she was extraordinarily beautiful. “Beauty is found within,” and I will add, “and without, at least at the beginning of it all” to that bit of historical verbiage.

As with most relationships, yes, there is the ridiculously fast fading immediate attraction for the still; the ‘I must have that now!’ bit of time. Thankfully, this passes or burns out quickly so the real work can begin, or a better mechanism can be found respectively. Mine passed exceedingly quickly, note, passed…did not burn out. At our first meeting we were surrounded and could not get down to brass tacks right off the bat, but after 30 minutes or so we were finally left to our own devices and spent a merry 2 hours together. Oh, the glory of it! It was windy and cold the day we met, but that is just a shadow in the corner of my memory when recalled. I actually think the first batch was brewed just then, between Stoughton and Home; and it was not a bad batch at that.

Jumping ahead to some later point in time, when a grand repoire was already in place, I sat admiring her from afar. She stood across a high, stony plateau. There was a distinct smell of heather stirred with cold, wet, salty sea air hanging between us. The low lying clouds brought ‘the big lands’ almost to a human scale, yet the long view of our world remained interminable. I had never seen her so disheveled, dirty and weather worn; yet she had never been more satisfying to me. (Maybe those old wise men really were wise?) A smile broke across my rough brow. I had asked a good deal of her over the past few weeks and she had sacrificed without protest. She had run on when she was empty, she had shelter me from the driving rain, bearing it upon her own breast, she had taken me to places I had never seen and never will again. Selflessness was her name. All the while she listened to my lamentations, my bitter, muffled sobs. Patiently yet firmly she comforted my heart…she was my cathartic, black smudge, MY precious, cathartic, black smudge. It was a completely inhuman experience. As near as can possibly be, she was the exact plug that my leaky heart required. And loved her.

djmase

10.23.08