I choose to follow a boisterous, forbidding voice. Admittedly, it has a razor's edge but is also easy-going, an anachronism spirited from an earlier period. There are no footprints to track, only sound, so I grab my walking stick and venture forth. The horizon is gathering the rising sun, and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to this bygone lullaby. The breeze is easy, and none of it makes any sense.
My hearing has rarely been this keen. I was cast in a blast furnace, stoked morning, Noon, and night, and I often slumbered endlessly, it seemed, immune, or so I thought to the cacophony, the tumult. The years rolled on, a chariot on flaming wheels circling my personal Coliseum, and I still slept and slept and slept as all those melting iron stallions were put down. I lost my hair, but my ears survived intact. It’s horrible, animals in agony. The sound they construct.
I hear it again, a gentle and sharp beseeching, a soulful hallelujah as if a thousand angels were speaking to me as one. And I move to it.
Hope.
Hoping.
Hopeful.
The serenade careens through a percolating canyon, and I perceive salvation and solitude outside my mind. Fakers only hear voices inside. I listen, and I hear it again. Switchback after switchback, my thighs throbbing, my knees buckling, I make progress, amends, lungs busting, I am pulled. Finally, mercifully, I come to the mouth of a vast sweeping valley. I close my eyes. This time it's this, I hear.
Be kind.
To.
Yourself.
I command, open wide, and I see a brawny brown bear in a cosmic meadow, wildflowers galore, and the grinning beast waves a massive paw at me. I see thousands of circling pristine doves in the budding sky, and they tip their wings as they soar by. I see leaping, arcing salmon in a babbling brook, and they flaunt friendly tails. A tree bows and ushers me to my seat—a great throne of heather and velvet grass. This is where I fit, I shout.
I should have whispered. Kept it (me) to myself.
Suddenly the trees drop their cheerful leaves and turn, naked and ashamed. The bear springs and snatches a dozen fat fish, devouring all, and rampages off, soaking wet, red-eyed. And a teeming cloud of battle hawks dive and decimate those trusting doves, and the feathers plummet, snowfall in early Fall, my favorite time of year, and I am dormant in white, permafrost ‘til I thaw in Spring.
Maybe I took a wrong turn someplace.
I know what I heard.
Though I have never been good at directions.
It’s all I can conclude.