morning’s promise
The Meeting Place. THIRTY-THREE.
The riderless silver steed, outfitted with a woven saddle blanket on which was buckled a small courier’s bag, had arrived under the full Buck Moon that warm July night to that far flung forest where time was told only in shadows. Even the steed itself knew not how it had found this flat expanse, the gravitational pull of place and time well beyond any maneuverings so deemed by man or beast. No, this appearance was guided by a starship of nebulous origins that palavered with the likes of galaxies yet unimagined.
It was the particularities of Earth that gave the Big-Hearted Gong its most glee. Like Persian miniatures, illuminated manuscripts, cave paintings, sea shanties, baskets woven of sweet grass, and all the mythologies, especially those with dreary endings, stories siphoned through the eyes and hands and feet and hearts of whatever grows wild in imaginations where the elements are set free to rise from their own deep histories and wrangle themselves into the stories the humans see fit to tell.
So when Songtender and Heartkeeper woke and waited together in the Standing Place for Giver Sun to brighten the stage of day, the midnight visitor emerged in the clearing from between the formidable trunks of Old Fir and Mother Cedar making a full kneel in the direction of the growing light.
Songtender and Heartkeeper walked in majesty toward the equine guest as if in a practiced scene. Together the couple whispered to him as they unbuckled the courier’s pouch and unhoused what was curled inside. Then they unsaddled the creature, thanked him, slapped his hindquarters and set him running, task complete. He turned the way he came and seemed to lift into the canopy just past Fir and Cedar. The humans, arm in arm, observed more in reverence than surprise.
Once back at the Standing Place, Songtender placed the delivery in Heartkeeper’s hands. They gazed with delight at how story had once again come to them. Uncurled, like a blossomed flower, was a small volume bound in supple leather, a tale they had yet to journey.
The Meeting Place is a jigsaw of fictional vignettes hosting several female characters destined to cross paths. The pieces work separately as contemplative offerings. The series began with The Meeting Place. ONE. (May 12, 2022)
