A Brightness Long Ago

We like to believe, or pretend, we know what we are doing in our lives. It can be a lie. Winds blow, waves carry us, rain drenches a man caught in the open at night, lightning shatters the sky and sometimes his heart, thunder crashes into him bringing the awareness he will die. We stand up, as best we can under that. We move forward as best we can, hoping for light, kindness, mercy, for ourselves and those we love.

The sailors say the rain misses the cloud even as it falls through light or dark into the sea. I miss her like that as I fall through my life, through time, the chaos of our time. I dream she is alive even now, but there is nothing to give weight or value to that, it is only me, and what I want to be true. It is only longing. We can want things so much sometimes. It is the way we are.

We are always the person we were, and we grow into someone very different, if we live long enough. Both things are true.

Perhaps in the darkest times all we can do is refuse to be part of the darkness.

What we think we’ll do is often not what we end up doing. It isn’t always in our own control, our life.

We see only glimpses of history, even our own. It is not entirely ours--in memory, in writing it down, in hearing or in reading it. We can reclaim only part of the past. Sometimes it is enough....

I think that when we're young we often have the sense that what we do when faced with a choice will define our lives forever. This can be untrue, sometimes amusingly so, but not always.

But when did the young people become clever? Isn’t that supposed to take time?” Guidanio doesn’t smile. “Wisdom does,” he says. “People can be clever at any age.

A song remembers a home, another conjures fear that home will fall to those who would destroy it. A poet places wine glasses on a fountain’s rim under stars. An artist sets his lost wife on a dome . . . amid stars. A dancer lets the music be what she is, until it stops. Someone made the music, someone plays it while she dances.

He had a sense, through that spring, that his life would be so much better for her presence. He wasn't wrong, but it was equally a truth that the purpose and direction of her life was not to make his better, and in time he even came to understand that.

It was interesting, I suppose it still is, how vicious men can take power and be accepted, supported by those they govern, if they bring with them a measure of peace. If granaries are full and citizens fed.

Shelter can be hard to find. A place can become our home for reasons we do not understand. We build the memories that turn into what we are, then what we were, as we look back.

An encounter on a springtime road. The random spinning of fortune’s wheel. It can sway us, change us, shape or end our days.

Gardens were an island of order imposed upon the chaos of the world.

Jelena had begun thinking about such things, how much having a chance to do what you were good at mattered.

She’d been afraid, preparing herself, after the summons came to the farmhouse—but fear was something you mastered, not a thing that defined you. Folco told all of them that, often. You didn’t deny you felt it, you ruled

People were ferociously poor. Farmers were abused everywhere, taxed mercilessly to keep the artisans and merchants in the cities happier with their lords—and so less dangerous.

It was, Jelena though, another kind of arrogance to believe you could understand the way the world was made. It could not be done, there was too much. You needed to be open to it, though, to what your life gave you and demanded.

We are what we are and the world is what it is

You can do impulsive, reckless things completely sober. Or, well, I could, when I was young.

those around a dying person, sometimes loving that person, had their own needs, and these were also to be addressed if you were in the world to heal.

The devout say we must trust in Jad. I have come to believe life is easier for them. Reversals are more easily dealt with when there is faith.

I haven’t always found that it is our intentions, the decisions we make, that shape and guide our lives. The opposite, just as often, it seems to me. Impulse creates our stories, or chance, the entirely unforeseen. And what we remember of our own past can be unpredictable. I didn’t learn this at school in Avegna, but I think Guarino would have agreed.

Perhaps as often as we dream of things we wish might come to be, we dream of what we wish had been otherwise. We are carried forward through time, but our minds take us back.

These two, the memories of last autumn, could be addressed later—if she chose. Right now, she had a task, and she could very much use whatever payment they ended up offering.