Postcard #6, Crinkle & Crackle

"Ebullient flowers become golden crypts and their hollowed trunks become hallowed homes for next year’s pollinators—new life is coming, but not yet."

This is a special release as it is provided to all subscribers of Denuding the Illusion. I am writing one “postcard” per week that is made available to PAID members. I hope you enjoy this postcard and, if you do, please consider becoming a PAID member to access all of the previous and future releases, along with all of my other essays, podcasts, and award-winning books (yes, PAID members have direct access to all my books).

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Click here to visit the main, TABLE OF CONTENTS page for this book, Postcards of the Night Sky sent to Shepherds.

Crinkle & Crackle

Under the crinkle and crackle of the mid mountain frost, summer’s tepid and tired ghost billowed steadily across the landscape. Its flume flew from all flues and its ether was equality—smoke, the great leveler, the great spirit that heats thrice.

Autumn is the time when life turns inward to wander in memory and to drift toward decay. Not death but a general desist occupies the land with business as it busily attends to nothing at all but the memory of a well-lived life and the anticipation of a well-lived death.

The northern wind rustled the leaves loose from their summer’s hold and acorns and walnuts plunked and splat upon the now flaxen-haired and brittle landscape. Supple and svelte once grew her general verve but her verte vim left with the late autumn frost. The acorns and their hulled cousins crinkled and crackled against the rigid but now yellow-orange gilded, leafed landscape, like thoughts over water or memories over the dark corners of our lives. Some will become trees themselves and some will become a maggot and worm-infused, ink black memory to support the ones that made it—the ones that will emerge next spring, if she ever does come.

Even our great Mother’s organs of sense and love now pulse ultimately through the closing arteries of her upcoming slumbers and her veins open wide to welcome the weary, winter travelers. Ebullient flowers become golden crypts and their hollowed trunks become hallowed homes for next year’s pollinators—new life is coming, but not yet. The hearth’s smoke, the summer’s ghost, descends to sing up the morning when the air around her warms with the sun and she descends to replicate herself infinitely against autumn’s great glistening and crystalline meadows. Like tangent shards of shattered glass, the melting, smoke-heaved frost alights autumn’s great moment with a flash of the fire’s breath and life turns back to look at itself, in memory—also like glass.

Life may grow unevenly and she often seems to favor the few. Some trees grow tall and some flowers grow not at all. Some, small acorns become some great trees and some, small acorns become the duft’s debris. But the autumn’s ether is equality and her general desist occupies her polity.

This morning I watched the first frost clothe the landscape. A wandering wonder of longing affixed me upon her changing tides, like a quaggy trimming or tired, holiday trapping, when I heard the frost crackle and crinkle the once supple and soon slumbering earth into a mixed, lithe heather of ashen purity. Smoke descends to sing up the morning and the northern wind plays in our arboreal cousins but the autumn and her smoke-heaved frost rustles our war-torn boughs loose of their summer’s work and we turn inward once again to wander in memory. How will we rise? Will we be trees? Or the duft’s debris?

Her crackle and crinkle, her glistening, shattered glass, and her tepid and tired ghost’s morning song reveals a kernel of her great truth. But I cannot elucidate it here, for this is no place for the weight of the world. Listen, we all have a chance. Is it autumn, is it morning? Does the frost clothe the dawn-darkness in a glistening lucidity? Does your heart need warming? Quick, to the stove or to the yard with logs or sticks and fly fast with your bare, burning feet and make fire your retreat. Retreat? Yes, leave this world with her and I and float up, up, up, as her song holds you and together, we will sing up the sun. There is the kernel if you could catch it. She is waiting, or maybe she is already billowing away.

Quick! She is waiting, or not.

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Thank you for reading this is a special release of Postcards of the Night Sky Sent to Shepherds, my latest book. These “postcards” or chapters are provided to all paid members of Denuding the Illusion. I hope you enjoyed this postcard and, if you did, please consider becoming a PAID member to access all of the previous and future releases, along with all of my other essays, podcasts, and award-winning books (yes, PAID members have direct access to all my books).