Open Window,
Closed Heart.

A Familiar Source of Desire
Is Suddenly Foreign to Us.

Missive Seventy-Five

By Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
DATELINE:
March 13, 2003, at 0130 hours CST.
Conway, Arkansas, USA

The windows are open, but the heart is not. The winds, the turning axis, another relentless cycle of change bring warmth from the south. Despite the delight we entertain o'er the first truly spring-like day of the year, we are worried and constrained.

How can you get it back when it seems lastingly lost? As for it, there is not a suitable definition. It is the dismissive shrug of the whatever, the empty medicine pouch in a drawer, the strand of broken leather. It is quiet anguish, unexplained.

Delicate shoots of the freshly planted annuals — brave violas and audacious snapdragons, whirling dianthus and fleecy petunias — reach from the earth toward a glorious stance on the horizon. Most shall be withered and done-for by the early summer, but tonight they brim and shimmer with hope, a familiar source of desire that is suddenly, strangely foreign to us.

We don't want to be so crassly selfish to pretend that our closed heart is anyone's concern, that the constraint we clamp upon the future is anything more than a patently personal affair of aggrieved sentiment.

Speak Life.

We are counselled by good advisors to count our blessings, become part of the solution, and speak life and life only. The intent of the guidance is to ensure the fullness of days and bring consolation at the stroke of midnight. The counsel is the champion of harmony and wholeness.

Outside the window a few dozen of the deeply rooted perennials are blooming at this early hour of spring, yellow teardrops on tall stalks. The once verdant season becomes oddly cruel. The calendar has not yet arrived at the measure of the equinox, but the earth stirs with birth and regeneration.

On the leading edge of splendor, we are stalled out and loaded down, looking backward and too powerless to move.

Like Flowers Out of Season.

Quickly without notice the effort to speak life, to glide in harmony on the avenue of our many blessings — it just fails us, it just falls on deaf ears, and all known solutions hide like outlaws, like flowers out of season they just die.

One of us has fallen without hope of recompense deeply and irrefragably in love with words, combinations of words, the ephemeral spinning of webs from words. The love affair was all that remained for us, or so we thought in the fog of so many imposed limits.

In our right hand the spade turns to reveal the dark soil, which is undeniably rich with nutrients and much promise. Already the winter's chill flees from the earth we've turned. Yes, it is warm to the touch! We refuse to deny the richness of it all.

An Offer from the Destroyer.

On the table in the early evening of a life, we watch the Destroyer lay an imminent offer before us: Go grey and refute the burden of potential. Don't you know, the Destroyer whispers, that they have rejected you, can't you see that they have closed doors that by rights should be wide open and welcoming to you? This time don't you know that the turning of the spade is about their final rejection of you?

By grace we are granted immunity to the Destroyer's imprecations. He is ushered out the backdoor by stern spiritual keepers and sent elsewhere into the harkening ether. In the half past moments of midnight we lay sleepless and count, count, count the many blessings. The windows are open, but the heart is not. The winter wears out its welcome once again.

ebenezer@corndancer.com

*This is the logical next step
toward THE One World Language.

Step Sixteen: Your simile on the hot spit!

Open Window, Closed Heart.

A Familiar Source of Desire Is Suddenly Foreign to Us.