Dark Matter

A murder of crows..

A murder?  Who thought of this?  Who decided to name these avian historians such a dark and angry name when they group, as if the fault is theirs?

These crows, they fluttered, feather askew, ruffled by the capricious wind, flapped and fluttered like ragged scraps of Death's cloak torn free from his regalia and flung skyward with little heed for up or down or any compass points.  Scattered into the dusking sky, harbingers of another soul parted from form.

Soul, or spirit?  What's the difference?

It was a deer, doe, unwary, perhaps not understanding the huge and forceful mechanical monster that bore down on her with speed she couldn't comprehend or calculate, catching her mid-leap then tossing her aside and roaring onward with no consequence save maybe a chipped tooth and a shaking driver who has somewhere to be, can't stop, stupid deer should've known better, on a timetable, dammit I hope she didn't wreck my front end.

The crows are brave, hopping to the side of the road and then back to her bounty.

Soul or spirit?

She's an animal.

Ego would have us believe that she has no soul, for animals are dumb in more than one sense.  But spirit they may have, for spirit is that little bit of the divine that all living things carry.

Soul, well, soul is for humans, only for humans, only for us because we are thinking, reasoning, self-aware, and more than that, aware of what is beyond us, of the indefinable.  We are uniquely able to see through the light into the heart of darkness, if we dare.

Beautiful dark.

I love the dark,

I hate it.

Cold and slick, it slips around me with sibilant whispers and intimations of what should.

What should?

This and that and anything that isn't.

I love the dark, the night pierced by stars and streaming light and the inexorable dance of the planets into entropy's embrace and the music that dayfolk tremble to hear in all its ecstasy.  Fearful, beautiful, loathsome, beloved dark.

I love the crows.  Tell me a story, cousin.  Harsh cries of "Aww!  AWW!!" back and forth and sometimes they land and turn their heads this way and that, staring at me and wondering what I am asking, what I am trying to tell with my hoarse, coarse mimicry of their tongue.

The crows don't know what should.  They only know what was and what is.  Something dies and they feast and remember and tell the tale and it carries from generation to generation from beginning to end, and in the end when the final darkness folds itself around everything, it will be the collective "Aww!  AWW!!" that rolls out and slowly dies into a near imperceptible vibration that shakes the single point loose and bursts outward into the new being, rooted in the old and ringing with that corvid call.

But we're the ones with souls, I'm told, immortal souls that mark us as more and better and other and all that, and certainly the deer was beautiful in her life, and graceful, but I with my clunky motion and graceless form am the better?  She provides life even in death and what do I do, in life, that is her equal?

I'm surrounded by death - dead eyed people staring at me because maybe I shine too bright within my darkness and maybe I don't care what they see with their flat eyes and cold gazes, dead spirited people who claim to have more soul, better soul because they pay lip service to something they don't believe, really, or at least they act contrary to the thing they worship.

All those shadows and shades, they don't like anything that isn't them and they claim soul as theirs alone and curse anything else.

The soul is immortality and so we are immortal, but that deer, she'll live forever in the crow's tales and in everything that feeds upon her carcass, certainly live long past the time the driver who hit her shuffles off this mortal coil and is buried in some vault where his body will never rejoin the whole and his precious soul will find itself astonished at suddenly being a deer wondering what that strange black surface is and if it can be crossed to find sweeter grass on yonder side, and what is that whistling, roaring noise?

Gettin' Grilled

Waaaaaah!

My beloved blue grill/portable fireplace bit the dust.  Literally - it lost another of its legs and tumbled to the ground, never to rise and burn again.

It happened when Sprout moved it so she could watch the roofer...er...roof, but I'm still sad about it.

Now I have no grill/portable fireplace, and I rather miss it.  I suspect I will miss it even more as we enter into grillin' season.  I know that Someone will be disappointed when he comes home and there's no way to char meat over burning stuff.

Sigh.

I still have the little grill we use for camping, but I kinda use that when we're camping which means it lives in the trailer and isn't awfully handy to the Casa.

I'd like to get a new grill for Casa de Crazy, one more suited to the use we put it to here, but it's not a priority.  Meanwhile, I am thinking about knocking the last leg off of Old Blue and placing it in the fire pit...okay, hole in the yard...and grilling at ground level for a while.  We're nothing if not adaptable and maybe a teensy bit redneck around here.

Whoa.

I found out this evening that the sheriff who lives two doors down was fired from his job because he allegedly had an inappropriate relationship with a detainee he was supervising.

The mind immediately leaps to conclusions, rather unflattering ones.

Mostly I feel sad for him and his family.  If it proves to be much ado about nothing, his reputation is forever sullied.  You can't wipe this kind of stain clean no matter how false the origins.  Just ask the McMartin family.

If it proves true, he faces some pretty serious consequences.  I don't know the family well, but if they're typical of this area, he faces losing his marriage, his kids, his job, perhaps his freedom and his future.  It is unlawful to have relationships with detainees, even consensual ones.  It is considered to be rape, regardless of the circumstance, and is treated as such.  It's considered a gross abuse of power.  A detainee cannot, under the law, consent.

I wonder if the horrid woman next door, the one who takes such a smugly superior tone with me when she hurls her judgement at me and my family, knows about this.  While she still discourages her children from playing with or even speaking to mine, she hasn't kept them from visiting with him and his.  I admit, this puzzles and galls - here I am, living openly and honestly and trying awfully hard to maintain my integrity and live a compassionate and loving life, and I'm snubbed and chastised...and there he is, accused of an egregious abuse of power and of breaking what are supposed to be vows so sacred that it offends them and their church to contemplate letting anyone outside their rather narrow norms take them, and he is still more acceptable company than my children.

Sigh.

Que sera, sera, but it is likely that I will keep watch from my distance, watch and wait and reach out to catch his family if they start to fall, make sure they are fed and can find solace if the worst occurs and the life they've always known disintegrates.  The children are not guilty of the sins of the father, not that I believe in sin.  He himself deserves compassion no matter what he has done, because he is human and may have lost his way, and being lost like that can be devastating to the human soul.  I've wandered lost, myself, far too often and too long to let anyone else suffer for want of light.