A Sunlit Bank of Memory

It was a mossy tree, fallen across an unattended trail that we happened to walk through one evening; one of those tranquil evenings with a calm setting sun that mirrored the same freshness of the rising rays of a spring morning. The way that guided us there was adorned quite lavishly with small while wildflowers. One side of the trail was fenced with a thick row of bushes and a couple of age-old trees, leaving enough and more spaces to glance at the river that paced by, while time flew. We sat on the fallen giant with all the respect we can offer his once-glorious days. He had already so generously sacrificed his body for the growth of new life. The soothing green moss and marble-patterned mushrooms that had sprung up covering his body to liven his lingering funeral made the walls that covered his core look almost transparent. It smelled like earth; it felt otherworldly.

The rays of the setting sun had fallen on the rippling river and the glow illuminated the fallen, withering body of the giant. We were mere insignificant parts of that harmonious amalgam of the living and the dead in that one place of the trail that belonged neither here, nor there. We weren't at the beginning; we weren't anywhere near the end. We were on the way but we were neither going, nor coming.

Whenever the occasional walkers passed through that way, we had to stand up and make way. And when the very last of the fading footsteps were gone, we were alone in the world of the living and the dead that smelled like earth and felt otherworldly. I kept staring at the magical glow of the waves constantly dancing to the silent universal rhythm blown away by the wind. I felt as if we could hear it if we were quiet enough to listen to it. There were two souls sitting on that fallen throne, but there ruled a silence as thick as a dragon skin, penetrated only by occasional wits, spites, and smiles: it was that thick and they were that sharp. That dancing glow in that one random evening lightened up my very being. I felt as if I was made of mirrors inside out. As the light hit my eye, they reflected the light on the other mirrors within me and I was one soul full of light. There wasn't a single dark corner in my soul at that moment. It was pure, ultimate, bliss.

Now, as I idle by on the dark, gloomy streets and by-roads of my soul in a darker hour of life, my mind, perhaps in a gut-attempt to heal me from within, tapped into that luminescent memory ever so live within me.  The light only had to shine on one mirror. I felt every broken bone, ripped off tissue and tangled vein turn into millions, trillions, gazillions of mirrors. The chamber was bright again. I felt my pain subside as it sank in those rippling waters of memory.

-Uththara-