Samhain 2011

Samhain 2011 - a reading (on YouTube)

Light, darkness, birth, death, each year begins with hope and ends in resignation.

The sun seeps through the clouds like a reopened wound, its watery light staining the landscape as if a thrice-washed bandage. At the edge of a shadowed wood, yellow daisies glow in the gloaming of the evening sun like a string of jack-o'-lanterns marking out the territorial margin between the land of the living and the land of the dead.

The wind whispers the names of the missing through the evergreens. Wind chimes toll a death knell for the departed. We cover their eyes for the ferryman so they can't see their destination. Into light or darkness we are unconcerned as long as they're at peace. Their cairns form the portals to the Otherworld. The moon holds a mirror to their souls.

Tonight, the glass is broken. Tonight, the dead and darkness become as one. We didn't used to fear the dead, we feared their disappointment. Like faded family portraits, ghosts were pale memories of once vibrant friends and familiars. Kobolds, goblins and Swedish tomte were once our kith and kin. In our desperate longing to reclaim them, we seek out witches, priests and necromancers to throw us winter's bone.

They cannot.

Life is a sacred gift, death a sacred mystery beyond the veil of which our mortal eyes were never meant to see.

© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III

Lughnasa 2011

Lughnasa 2011 -a reading (on YouTube)

In the struggle between light and darkness, the light is failing. The outnumbered hours of night have launched a surprise attack. Like a bad year in Machiavellian Florence, we bar the gate and lay in supplies against the long, impending siege of darkness. Resistance gathers throughout the high country, in hilltop forts and hidden, lakeside coves. Reaping maidens don gowns of green and stretch the backs of their men, their harvest promises extracted and bound with hay.

At midnight, a lone firefly finds me, like Hamlet's ghost, keeping a worried watch upon the wall. He bears a message from the summer solstice, his tiny beacon turning back the night. Like a morningtide rainbow after a sun shower, his flickering torch is a promise or a reminder. We will not be abandoned by our strongest ally in our coming time of need.

At first light, foraging parties roam the wood under a keen-eyed escort, reaping the bountiful berry harvest before it, like the surrounding faerie kingdom, falls into decay. Summer grapes, like the irides of Europa's wild-eyed children, or the wide eyes of playful garden predators, have gone from green to black overnight. Bees, like summer soldiers, gather golden nectar from colorful morning glories and crepe myrtles to create the supplies they need to overwinter in their fastness.

In distant fields and meadows, the tawny heads from the first fruits of harvest are crushed to powder beneath the circling, ox-drawn stone. Brickwork ovens throw the first heat against winter's eventual arrival. Offerings of freshly baked bread fill the air to appease the spirits of the homeless and the hungry. As we've sown in this verdant time of plenty, so in the darkness shall we reap.

We long for stability, for prosperity, for peace. But all we are given are wheat and wild grapes, fieldstone and timber, venison and salmon, spring water and perhaps a little honey. Enough to live and share if we don't become absorbed in the drama of conflict. From the elements at hand we build our lives in any way we choose, in light or in darkness, for good or for ill. In this, we are inseparable from our environment.

© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III

Summer Solstice 2011

Summer Solstice 2011 - a reading (on YouTube)

Sunrise, sunset. The day is here, the day is gone.

Summer and winter are inextricably intertwined. Like mating black snakes in a caduceus, they cross at every solstice. Sunrise on the summer solstice aligns to sunset on the first day of winter, just as summer's sunset lines up with winter's dawn. Between those twin poles, time ambles like the river running from the land of the living to the world of the dead. Its wide, unrippled mirror reflects approaching storms in blue and gray and white.

As I tread along the path beside, a mockingbird marks my passage, scalloping from post to post along a fence, always one step ahead, a taunt or a reminder, of what I am unsure. A woodpecker peers from a keyhole in time-hardened tree trunk, then retreats into its sanctuary. A flutter of crows calls back and forth across a dapple-shaded canopy, harbingers of winter tidings as yet unforeseen. Their dark conversations are as brief as summer showers, all traces evaporate beneath the resurgent sun.

Deep within the faerie wood, dawn belatedly flickers through the leaves concealing the horizon to liberate the sleeping giants from the long, sweet siege of night. The fire-stricken kings crash to their knees, their arboreal crowns shattering as they fall. A host of golden-green usurpers sprout from their sun-dispelled shadows, in want of regents as they strive to reclaim their ancient, ancestral lands.

As I wander from morning toward a deeply shadowed afternoon, time creeps forward on padded feet, unnoticed, like vines entwined across a brushfire clearing, like grass subduing the stain a midden mound or a cemetery hill, until it gently covers all.

Sunrise, sunset. The day is here, the night is come.

© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III

Fall Equinox 2010

Fall Equinox 2010 - a reading (on YouTube)

The day dawns on a knife's edge, white light at right angles, reflected soft yet sharp and flinty. All the rose and gold is gone. The world is torn in opposite directions by two equally powerful horses, one white, one black, summer and winter, hope and despair. Within weeks, we'll know which one will win. Light and shadow grapple in a stranglehold. The light is fading. Like a sling stone arcing past its zenith, we prepare for the fall.

Soon the world will be cloaked in shadow. The time of illusions is upon us, a time when men see the world they want to see. We once again descend into a dark fairyland beyond the reflecting pool where acceptance becomes intolerance, moderation turns to greed, prosperity to war. Torture and surveillance come back in vogue, progress and reason fall out of fashion. Children sight security down the barrel of a gun. A candy apple potion waits outside my door, a bright pink post-it beckoning me to drink and share this common vision of the world.

I resist this temptation of the trickster spirits as their numbers build toward Samhain. I prepare my protections and sacrifices within an isolated circle. From behind the distorted hand mirror, an innocent seductress unleashes a jarful of beautiful evils upon our world out of curiosity. She seals their remedy back inside when she learns what she has done, where it sleeps alone in darkness against our future need. A lone candle burns brighter at midnight on midwinter. A lone voice carries farther in the silence a cappella. A long drink of water tastes sweeter after the rainless days of drought.

On days like this, I wish I could transform myself into a tree. A leafy sanctuary for birds and squirrels. A shady rest for weary travelers. A stepping stone for children to climb into the sky. I would not run when the axmen came, as they always seem to do. For a short while, I would stand resolute against their rusty blades as they ticktocked away my skin, their blows ringing as regular as clockwork up and down the grove. Little do they know the skulls of their ancestors lie buried beneath my brethrens' knees. The saplings feed upon their marrow. Trees don't attack or defend, they are patient, their acorns opportunistic. Even with their ancestors felled, seeds sleep peacefully beneath the long, harsh snows of winter, waiting only for the warm breath of sunlight to revive the grove again.

The wheel must turn through its progressions. One day, the world will return to balance. Then, brightly colored blossoms will beckon rather than the flickering flames of the discarded. A world of life and rebirth rather than leaf mold and decay. A world of hope. Just as there is no summer without winter, there can be no spring without the fall.


© 2010 Edward P. Morgan III

Lughnasa 2010

Lughnasa 2010 - a reading (on YouTube)

At twilight, the battle rages. In the war between light and darkness, each side gains temporary supremacy only to cede its conquests as the annual cycle marches on.

The sun recedes from its high water mark. The blitzkrieg of Beltane is no longer seen as a benevolent liberator by Lughnasa. Darkness amasses a counterforce set to strike on the equinox. By Samhain, a series of nighttime raids will reoccupy the border strongholds in the empire of the sun, whose string of minor setbacks transforms into a rout.

But the sun remains high and bright this morning, a piercing tyranny of light. Little hides from its unrelenting gaze. Just a softness lingering near the margins, more shade than shadow, sensed but not quite seen. Until darkness swells on the horizon and low clouds grumble their righteous indignation until their indigo anger flashes brilliant white against the despotic summer blues.

At dusk, sunlight melts into the crucible of another day, its molten gold briefly shining through the accumulated dross before staining the horizon a bloody red as it reluctantly yields the field to night.

Storms of yellow twilight bring a gentle rain of lavender flowers, each tiny blossom replaced by another in seemingly inexhaustible clusters. Soon, their colorful numbers will dwindle, unreplenished, as summer's tears wash the fallen into shallow, muddy graves and a chorus of the night sings in requiem.

But tonight, that insurrection is merely in the planning phases, bright lines on a celestial map, shadows gathering behind the garden wall. The lords of light still reign resplendent, while dark princes wait impatiently for their time to rule our terrestrial realm.


© 2010 Edward P. Morgan III

Spring Equinox 2010 (two days early)

Spring Equinox 2010 - a reading (on YouTube)

Today, the world divides into two equal parts, light and darkness, day and night, hemispheres. Patterns ripple and flow between the two across a twilight bridge where reason and emotion intertwine, a thoroughfare for dreams.

At eventide, the faeries make their presence known. They fight a proxy war beneath the banner of the Green Man to change the world from dun and gray to verdant, vital and marked with color.

At dusk, they lead a procession with tiny torches, flickering on and off, tempting restless wanderers to explore the realms of Nyx and Nott. Garments woven with threads of silver, sapphire and garnet twinkle against the indigo fabric of night. Their gossamer congregations sometimes mask the moon.

At dawn, they daub bare branches with sponges of chartreuse and burgundy that float just above the wood like a colorful haze. Each morning they experiment with palettes of purple, pink and red, preparing unique mixtures to swirl and stain fresh blossoms, applying vivid splashes based on a secret color theory whispered across the wind by the idyll masters of each pastoral, floral guild.

Betwixt, they flit and flutter on capricious yellow wings, surveying frivolous domains. Tiny harpers call the tune for a battle in song between the secular and religious, divisions whose champions are plumed in steely blue and Cardinal red. Vagabond minstrels range behind the lines to gently mock each side.

There is purpose to their chaotic motion. They seek to lull a chthonic deity into releasing his vestal maiden captive so they might initiate her into the Eleusinian mysteries and crown her Queen of Spring.

As the coronet of supple snowdrops settles upon her flowing midnight tresses, her parti-colored entourage celebrates with bawdy songs and brimming cups of nectar. The long sleep of winter has ended. Let the dreams of summer begin.

© 2010 Edward P. Morgan III

Samhain 2009

Samhain 2009 - a reading (on YouTube)

Half the year we spend in darkness struggling to find the light. The night is not evil, only mysterious and unknown, unilluminated.

Unblinking eyes embrace the darkness tonight, glowing in the shadows, some friendly, some not, some merely mischievous. They look out from behind the masks of archetypes, the stories we tell each other gathered around the harvest fire to remind ourselves that danger is ever present and all around.

We tell tales of the horned god who is the hart bounding through the forest, darting into shadows to keep the wolves at bay. Like him, we fear the onset of twilight, the hunting hour for wolves and panthers. We sense them stalking us from a time when a flash of eyes provided our only warning before a scream heralded that one of us had gone missing, disappearing behind a trail of blood. The stag serves as the guardian of the forest deer, a reminder that if we are quick and willing to confront the circling pack in our fastness, our children will survive and prosper. But to him, we are just another set of eyes in the night, another predator darkly desirous of his flesh.

We speak of the great mother, the black soil beneath our feet from which life springs, as dark and mysterious as a cave. Sometimes cruel, sometimes gentle, she nurtures her better children and grinds the rest to nourish the next generation already stirring in her womb. She is the dark earth goddess we appease with blood, bone and flesh to keep the land fertile and the harvest towers full. After the sickle falls, she embraces our dead, still her children, whose eyes make our spines tingle in the night when she sends them out to play.

We whisper of the old crone, our ancestral grandmother, toothless and bent yet bold and unintimidated, reminding us with her cane when she thinks we've gone astray. She is the good witch whose identical twin lives deep among the trees luring children into her lair with sweet promises before devouring their innocence, baking them into men and women in her oven before offering them as sweetmeats to her pets, some of which have learned to walk on their hind legs among us. Their hungry eyes follow us while she hums through her preparations, devising a cunning plan to separate us from the shepherds and woodcutters so they can dine on lamb come spring.

Finally, we utter stories of the goblins, the thieves that live among us, miscreants of mischance that pilfer our good fortune. Hardship and misadventure waiting to steal our cache of luck, they are the mischievous spirits lurking near our shame. Once, they were simple village numina, kobolds and tomte easily appeased. Outcast from our homes like demons, now they gather in clans and tribes, packing up like wild dogs to hunt, setting camps deep inside the forest to brigand the unwary and unsuspecting. Their eyes shine beyond the windows tonight, casting back red or green reflections as they call for treats in small, high voices.

Half the year we spend in darkness struggling to find the light. Tonight beyond the harvest fire, eyes embrace the darkness, tracking us through the night. We must be careful not to hold their gaze or we will be spellbound by our own reflection.

© 2009 Edward P. Morgan III

Vernal Equinox 2009

Vernal Equinox 2009 - a reading (on YouTube)

Last night I dreamed I was standing on a knife's edge, a precipice. On one side lay darkness, on the other, brilliant light. The division between the two was so sharp it could draw blood. I stood on a narrow threshold, slightly dizzy, longing to embrace the light but fearing that if I turned away the horned king would pull me backward, consuming me in his fury. I stood like a deer before a hunter, unmoving, unblinking. Then the dream faded into uneasy sleep.

I woke this morning to a tornadic kitten clawing a swath of destruction across the bed. Amber light seeped through the blinds. A jar of Tupelo sunlight had overturned in the office, it's honeyed contents pooled upon the desk. The world beyond the window is softened by the morning. Light slants gently through the trees as shadows cling to every curve and crevice and the haze gives form to both.

Outside, the hibiscus has unfurled a bright red pennant, declaring itself for spring. Spider webs flash coded messages from the mailbox to the trees. Higher now, the sun sparkles off bright new leaves, a forest of tiny jewels, a private tribute to a crystal anniversary. A cardinal descends to the feeder then flits to the bare branched myrtle, sharing kisses with its mate. Flurries of oak flowers descend, forming drifts across the driveway like ropes of dirty snow.

Inside my sanctuary of glass, I watch swirls of steam rise from my coffee cup, lambent in the morning light. I reflect on my dream from the night before, and remember a similar threshold many years ago. One spring from Imbolc to the equinox, I haunted a wooden bridge across a quiet stream in a botanical garden at school with a novel between classes. On the near side was the domain of daylight, cultivated paths, constrained rivulets, maintained shelters. On the far side, the domain of night, fallen trees, the wilds, the clearings where we performed our youthful rites and ceremonies behind a veil of darkness. Below was the stream, always the same yet ever changing in swirls and eddies, rising and falling with its principal seasons, rain and dry. Upstream was the rope swing where we would splash once summer solidified its grip. Downstream were the dorms where soon I would go to live.

But it was the scene above the bridge that captivated me as I stared into the sky between chapters. At first the view was clear, obstructed only by denuded maples. At Imbolc, I saw nothing but the piercing blue of a crystalline sky broken by a web of branches. As the days fluttered by like pages of a unattended novel riffled by a spring breeze, I noticed a faint red blur clinging to each branch. The blur became a fuzz that each day became a little more distinct as tiny, red leaves unfolded to seek the sun, their winter slumber over. Week by week, I marked their progress as they grew then slowly transformed from red to yellow-green, half a shade each day. By the equinox, they were a full, bright green, their canopy completely shading the sky.

I relish the memory of those tranquil spring days after a series of harsh winters. Like the new, red leaves I remember that spring, I draw comfort seeking the sun, knowing that until summer ends I no longer need to fear the darkness. The wind outside brings changes. The night king's time is over; the sun queen's reign has just begun.


© 2009 Edward P. Morgan III

Shadow Play

I talk a lot in these messages about the natural environment, flowers and trees, birds and squirrels, snakes and hawks, light and shadow and color. Generally, they provide my inspiration. They anchor me.

When I started this message, I had a different exercise in mind. Books on writing dialogue recommend exercises in eavesdropping to get a feel for how people actually talk to one another. The point is not to capture the exact manner in which people converse, it's more to get an impression of it, then distill it down to its crucial elements, boiling away all the ers and uhms, the pauses and non-productive tangents to capture the essence of the exchange.

When I sat down to write this, I had a particular theme in mind: watching the people outside my window and what I could learn from the few seconds they are within my sight each day. My notes included things like who had become pregnant, who had hired a nanny, who had gotten a new dog. A husband and wife walking together but separate, her several feet behind as though they shared a completely separate world. Who had started on an exercise routine, who was trying out for cross-country. Who was gleaning extra money by picking through their neighbors' recycling.

The first rule of inspiration is that it's capricious. The muse changes direction without warning or explanation, like a butterfly on the wing. At first I felt resistance, though I couldn't figure out why. Resistance turned to judgment, the idea that the original concept had never been worthwhile and never would be, not matter how long I struggled with it. It is easy to tip from there into melancholy, doubting everything from my talent to my purpose, my direction and my voice. Those are the inglorious moments that few people witness. The joys of being a writer.

I set the message down to salvage another message, another errant child who didn't want to be led down the path where I thought it should go. If anyone is looking for an insight into writing, into creative endeavors of any kind, it is that sometimes you have to force your way through the resistance no matter how wrong it feels. Not your original idea. If you get too rooted in that you will get frustrated and give up. You have to travel where the river takes you, not swim against the current, and trust that you will end up at a pleasant destination. So I sat back down with this message and kept typing, just to see where the stream of thoughts would lead.

People tend to see nature as something different from their everyday surroundings. I'm not sure a bright line exists between natural and man-made environments. Where does my yard end and nature begin? Do the snakes notice the lines of demarcation, or do they just circumvent them like so many thickets and brambles and fallen logs? Do the squirrels notice any difference between the acorns in the oaks on either side of the ditch? Do coyotes discern between a cat on the prowl in the park and in my yard? Does a fox care where it finds a rabbit? Does a hawk think of our chainlink fence as anything more than a cool and slippery perch?

We like to think we control the environment around us, but we don't. Sure we clear land, build houses, transplant non-native species, exterminate pests. Everything we do has an impact. At the same time, other species, pigeons and cats, squirrels, roaches and rats, are at least as adaptable as we are. While we push some creatures to the verge of extinction, others flourish in the margins we've created and thrive on the detritus we leave behind. I'm not saying our impact is value-neutral. Nor do I see it as an anthropocentric manifest destiny. As long as we see ourselves as separate from our environment, we will continue to cause unintended consequences as we alter the complex systems upon which our lives depend. As long as we see ourselves as separate, we are benign dictators, Marie Antoinettes trapped within our Versailles gardens while the countryside erupts and the flames entertain us by casting shadows on our walls.

That was the beginning of my tangent as I sat back down to write. I wasn't sure where it was going or what it had to do with watching people, so I set it down again, waiting for another inspiration, some combination of man and nature to draw it all together.

On Saturday morning, our neighbor had a yard sale. She had one last weekend but didn't get the numbers she'd hoped for so she advertised and tried again. This week the turnout was brisk. Cars came and went, parking on both sides of the street, often across our driveway. But there was not so much traffic as to scare the blue jays off the birdfeeder out front. While we ate breakfast, Mara, our youngest cat, sat in the front window watching them. A car parked beyond our mailbox and a couple got out to see what treasures might lay hidden amongst the castoffs scattered across our neighbor's drive.

For an instant, those elements of man and nature came together. The sun, just high enough to reflect off the curve of the car's windshield but low enough to sneak beneath the trees, passed through the low, bare myrtle branches, then through front window and past the cat to paint a perfect silhouette in shadow on our living room wall. Something about the balance of images caught me, the crosshatch of muntins defining the window broken by the sweeping curves of branches, the shadow cat below with ears erect balanced by the squares of light above, all overlaid onto the everyday items that occupy our painted wall. I pointed it out to Karen who, in her own creative moment, captured the portrait with her camera. A moment later the couple returned from their outing and drove away. The scene before us faded.

Some days, I only get a glimpse of an inspiration, cobbled together from the elements at hand. Like a signpost on a switchback path, the way is only visible for a moment before it darkens and is gone. Like the sunlight dancing across the wall of Plato's cave, that shadow play made it difficult to tell where nature ends and man begins, which was real and which an illusion. Or whether the combination of both had created something else completely.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Beltane 2008

A spot of light in one corner of the window oozes across the bone white curtains, staining them the color of liquid honey. Amber slowly pales to sunshine yellow then to white before it fades into dappled gray as it hides behind the bright green veil of spring.

Sunset bracketed by folded wings with filigrees of light, traceries of cloud, like Icarus descending in fire behind a copse of trees, burning against their matchstick shadows, observed only because it's partially obscured.

Herons and egrets lazily chase sunrise then sunset in silhouette. Do they notice the beauty beyond their destination on these daily migrations? Or do they, like us, transit the sky blindly, thinking only of work and home, past and future, never truly living in the present?

Beltane, the pastoral transition from spring leas to summer grazing. Tonight, we light the purifying bonfires in a ritual celebrating our survival through the spring. The flames flicker across still pools of night, encouraging the rebirth of our dead. As numerous as fireflies on a summer's eve, their souls are like tiny echoes of the distant fires reflected in the water, waiting only for us to light the candles that eventually will guide them home.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Fall Equinox 2007, two days early

There is a bright white quality to the light this morning. The sun sparkles as it filters through the leaves of the oaks to the east. The morning light is even, the colors in the garden pure. Lavender petunias, yellow alamandas, red impatiens. The fuchsia of the final myrtle cluster. The white of a lone rose. All untainted by the pink or orange or gold of dawn.

The dark clouds have lifted, the storm has drifted north. Last night's rain has washed summer from the air, at least for one morning. When she returns, her heat will be half-hearted as though she knows her days are numbered and she can no longer bring herself to give her best. We enter the time between, the twilight of summer before we throw our windows open to embrace the fall into night. The dying embers of a once raging fire, warm, no longer blazing.

The morning is full of motion. The wind sways the branches of the myrtle as though they are bobbing for apples in the bird bath, or seeking to shed the clusters of berries that replaced their flowers overnight. Pine needles, brown and sere, spiral down to carpet the lawn. The chimes on the porch ring a five note harmony. The air is dry, the sound carries like carillon.

A year ago, I sat on the porch trying to capture the sounds and scents of another equinox two days early. My desire was to write, to keep writing. To mark the cardinal points of the coming year, to celebrate their midpoints with words. Eight messages were my goal. At the winter solstice I got caught up in someone else's adventure and poured my energy into that instead. The remaining five still flew from my mind, sometimes on battered wings, sometimes in the dead of night, sometimes barely taking flight. But they held the air if not always soaring.

That small accomplishment inspired other messages, other musings. They are my experiences, they are my expression. They are my visions, sometimes confessions. They are exercises to keep my mind from dwelling on what might have been, what might yet go wrong. They are the ones I feel are good enough to share. Some days, they are the only thing I write. They are my commitment, one taken a year ago, in similar light, in similar weather.

So this morning finds me savoring that pure white light as it casts clouds of flame upon my desk after passing through the red and orange glass panel in my window aptly titled Serenity. I hope the coming equinox finds you as peaceful and content.

© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III