I’m desirous of everything all at once. It rips and tears at me like a madness. I am only a human; struggling with raw ambition, methodic duty, and freedom-however restrained. My consciousness has grown trapped and bursting against the nearly insufficient borders of a finger painted mortality, primary colors that clash and smudge and may be eradicated against contesting secondary impulses. My paws rake the earth, too large and clumsy for the path they’re put upon. Would that I were a dormouse, navigating my daily due diligence to from nature and nurture, instinct and pleasure, through high-rises bladed green and cobwebs like silk refracting molten gold Helios rays like a micro-supernova.

The desensitized giant that I am is a destroyer of worlds; crushing the intricate lattices of networked communities governed by Prideland law and a council of small woodland creatures. Cities of belly-crawlers and under-foots.

The immensity of minutiae; that was what my last chapter was all about. My observations solely my own and prone to obsessive detail and outcries of rebellion against foes I knew not. Heavy doses of narcissism under a telescope autobiography- a role played well past its welcome. I sit. And breathe. And know the detail in a singular purple blossom, but only now have I opened mine eyes wide enough to glimpse the greater garden before the lone flower.

Here I am, risen to heights with blackbirds in this impromptu sanctuary. Love is love is love. Zoom out, broad strokes, “Be of the solids in need of its fruits,” and this is no longer my story alone.

We five now, let us begin.

We always take it for granted, waking up in nature as if out of the ether. Might we truly exist in between the moments of each other’s stillness; between the uneven breaths? But then the vortex inside of this bottle – like downtown London in the rain, light refracting prisms off of puddles and perspectives off of brick walls. Stark contrast for thought.

Arise, wake, shine, drink of the air as if all before this moment was contained within the atmosphere of a barren planet, and now the fledgling lives of a new race take their first breaths. Never homeless but home-free and here on this spectrum of crisp reality and saturated, longing colors of azure skies and emerald forests, making their way from the ground up against my skin rubbed raw and clean by nature- my paws liberated from their canvas traps and triumphed in the muddy waters, toes wiggling, tadpoles reaching the shallows and seeking the depths.

Moonshine, we shine, what living we have wrought. This spring green the vibrant color of winter’s redemption. Faster and faster racing through the branches and tumbling down, down and into one another’s’ orbits, collide and disperse and reinvent each other in the moment. Creation is creation is love is abundant is visceral is everywhere. The geese fled before us, the turtle sat among us, the turkey vultures dropped around us and the dogs danced in the firelight and the horses shared the dusk with us as we ventured finally home and greeted the moon, yet not before the cows spurned our wobbling advances and we were as children on a playground.

This cabin, this home, the answer to my burdened conscience. Tomorrow I will rise again and conquer the hours and do the work I was born to do. As for today, so we begin.