I Came Back Haunted (2014 Part 3)
(photo from my personal files)
Simply put, it's like I am a little out of my tree. You know? Nutbar. I don't like labels. They are misleading at best and hurtful at worst. You cannot label me with one word, can you? Is there just one that will serve?
I guess it should be stated here and now that I don't want to know what you label me. I am not of a mind to give it one more thought.
I can't. Don't you know labels go a long way toward distorting the truth? For example, chicken noodle soup doesn't just contain chicken, noodles, and water–slosh it all together. Chicken soup varies like the wind. Campbell's has its own recipe. My momma does too. It really does not matter to the naked eye.
The naked eye sees the letters that form the word. The mouth waters or the stomach churns, according to your perception.
Blind ambition.
Following the blurb you heard
Is it any wonder why we have a hard time to get along? So many variables. We need a global language or maybe we just need to constantly taste the soups available to us and keep in (mind) the notion that just because you like one soup, doesn't mean you would like another. You must simply say–I know of chicken soups. The ones I've tasted remind me of this or that.
In other words, keep an open mind. Keep it open for all to see? No. For yourself. For now.
Walk with me now, down a path. It stands behind our house. Deep within the woods.
A winding path. A place to walk along on either side of you there are trees of twenty different sizes, a dozen different varieties.
The dried old orange leaves dangling from the beech trees just sway in the breeze.
Just wandering along, you will not miss them. They wave constantly. Even in the middle of the night on a humid August evening the air becomes so still you hear the rustling of these leaves. The wiggle of the trees. The eyes that do not see. It is a mystery to me. To me. To me. Surely, it is a mystery to me.
Walking down into the dim, the gloom. Bustling leaves again. A feeling like a whisper on the back of your neck. A gentle cold touch. But nothing. Nothing your eyes can see, is there. No rainbows. No shades. No variations of the perceived truth.
Just you. Just these trees. These leaves. This darkness. Something something something. Fear. A feeling. That is all.
Smells of the forest floor lure you back to your senses. Mushrooms. Moss. Rotted, sodden wood. Wood gone to rot. To mulch.
The spiders spinning the web seems to make herself known.
She is there and she is watching you with a million beady eyes. Your reflection goes by and by and by.
We do not know exactly what the spider sees. We fear all those extra parts. Scuttling and spinning and stabbing and sucking and spying on us all. All the time.
We are not her competition. We are the weather–the massive storms that take away her nest (rest). Crush her young. Poison her air. We want nothing to do with each other. We just keep moving along, whistling to prove we are not afraid.
I am not afraid. No. I am not afraid at all to look into the light under a microscope to see the hairs on a spider's legs. I am afraid to stare into the eyes of the young creature of the photo. Decked out in over-starched lace and linens.
I am afraid to know what happens there because I know the story but I see some unnamed truth as well. Dead men, women, and children walking. A barbaric yet understandable use of the primitive cameral lens. Film and the ability to capture a moment in time.
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