last night I dreamed
of iridescent mountainsides
shimmering seas of wet grass
in the deepest green tides
Desultory and alone
so far will I roam
from these gentle shores
where lay our home
awaking is the mainia
of a return to arcadia
From every mountain top she wails and sings
A howling upon the height
She is there in the flap of birds' wings
In delicate grace of flight
A gentle touch of air by day
But wrathful gales by Night
She makes dress flutter and hair sway
Sailing ship and flying kite
To her, forests bow and yield
The great harbinger of mist and cloud
Which fall upon plow and field
Across the lands a drifting shroud
In sky and in showers
Only from her the steep grows
To blooming meadows of flowers
All that we reap, she sows
Fire writhes before her call
As it fears her omen
Waves rise, crest, and fall
On the piers of every ocean
Even the dry deserts crawl
In a thousand years of motion
Under her cry and her thrall
Peaks and poles are frozen
Through all she flows
Above all she towers
Where the wind blows
Beauty overpowers
After two decades of drought, after my entire childhood, it was like I had seen the color green for the first time in my life.
I keep thinking of how I can describe it. If there is any way to describe it. The most intense emotion I’ve ever felt. The most alive I’ve ever felt. It felt like I was awake for the very first time. I don’t know if any work of art could ever capture a fraction of it. I think every single thing I’ve tried to express since then has been a striving to what i felt. It can never be expressed. Every bit of philosophy I study, every piece of art I experience. The rest of my life. It will stand in the shadow of that single moment.
After twenty years of drought. After two years of quarantine. After two million acres of fire and two weeks of thick orange sky. I stepped outside, and I saw green for the very first time.
And at the same time…. Maybe most of all it was the least intense moment of my entire life. It was so simple and light. So quiet. I just breathed in perfect air, I just basked in soft warm light… it was an emotion which required absolutely no effort to feel. I had no idea I was trying so hard to feel anything until the moment where I didn’t even need to try. It was just so unimaginably pure and soft. Awake for the first time in my life, and it felt like dreaming.
it was just a feeling of the pure realness of existence,
so real that it forced me to question the realness of everything else I had ever experienced
PANTHEON
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