A darkening core is something one would think to hide, it’s true. To reveal the inner black smirches is not considered socially acceptable. Nor is it possible to admit to rot, even when revealed to public view. So we all keep our secrets and a modicum of decorum. And yet I am drawn to the secret lives of those we think we know. I foolishly think I can get so close, part a few branches, see all revealed, and then slip away without being seen in turn. I refuse to realize the greening growth of our cover-ups as beautiful, and refuse to disclose my own heart’s root. Someday soon perhaps I will lock defenses with another, like an antlered stag refusing to give way, and lose all hope to life in my stubbornness and pride. But perhaps I will learn to relinquish this struggle instead, resting at peace in time.

This is the second group of pictures taken at Beaver Brook, a Massachusetts state reservation managed by the Department of Conservation and Recreation. More details about the site can be found here.

The mantle lightning of summer storms always seems to come as a break – a resounding clap of tensions released, the world returning to peace and balance. In summer, it is the sun, rather than the storm, that brings oppression. Humidity and heat alike glaze us into half-dumb beasts, our sweating tongues losing the memory of all but the most basic speech. Minds go numb in the sunlight, freezing at the most recent point of comprehension. There is an endless stuck-record repetition of tasks: and then…and then…and then….

The thunder-crackle releases us all, to wind about our lives wetly, until the sun dries out the dampness of our brains again.

The shrieks of dying eagles torn beneath yellow-pearl tooth and scabietic claw. The mottled reds and browns of once-neat flustered feathers. The rocky landing of the half-human monster on the wide peeling-branch perch that almost cannot support its weight. The sagging neck, vulturelike, once humanely straight. The remnant of beautiful eyes, red-line with memory and regret.

Torn from the shackles of life, I waited. Washed by air movements, water fingers, the ripples of eroding time, I waited. Reduced, reused, but not quite yet recycled, I waited. I continue to play my waiting game, the detritus of other lifetimes eddying around me. I reach life-hardened knobby fingers to cling with tenacity to what I have left, but sometimes I wonder. The continued strain of my struggle must someday leave me unable to rise up again.

They say the deeper waters are blue due to the pulse and weave of that one molecule of all life’s force.  Perhaps in a drinking glass it is not possible to see the truth hidden in the depths of a water-filled mine shaft, or perhaps this blue is just another circumstance of my mind disguising truth.  Still, my eye remains attracted to the curve of light on water, the odd vision of a reflected world, the deep red of oxidizing rocks coated with a haze of blue.

My twin by my side, reclined only to death.  I feel..halved somehow, even though I am all still completely here.  At best, all I can do is lean down and whisper my loss to the ants who will someday carry away my heart’s wood as well.  This was once an idyll of a life.  This was once the strength beneath children and the shelter of small living things.  This was once a hope for things to come, a potential of vigor and use.  I too, was once this proud and tall.

It is the tree’s art to dig down against decades. It is the water’s art to even more slowly wear away. Beneath my feet there is only water in playful ripples, a merriment I cannot join but for my own destructive and childish games. I could splash and churn inches of stream water out of its banks. I could, perhaps, dance-pound this bridge until it gives way. But what would it take to make this monolith of tree my next Pooh-stick?

Why is it expected for our own eyes to deceive us only in the desert?  It is the glitter and sparkle of the water that catches my eye, the half-imagined perception of a strange shadow, the warbling of some edge that my mind cannot quite understand.  The wind waves to me from the leaves and twigs and trees, and I can only follow slowly with my eyes.  In cases such as this, what can I do but ask myself ‘what if’?

What secret spaces inside our mind’s eyes lead us into silence and isolation?  What distance of mind lies between I and you?  And in spanning that distance (can we ever really span it?) do we create something with a life more than our own?  And in refusing to span it, do we share despite ourselves?  Just what does the rhetoric and emotion and knowledge of shared experiences mean?