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What am I?

Light enwombed in darkness,
Light without heat,
World without gravity,
And when I am with you,
My shadow is more substantial than belief

I span hours in seconds,
Walk miles without feet,
And our trek together ends oft
Without memory,

At times, I gather fear,
Closer to the chest,
Than a heartbeat

At times I comfort those
Who grieve

Sometimes I tell
Truth, sometimes I
Deceive

What am I?

While you ponder it, let's catch up.

Hey,

So what brings you here? Sometimes it helps to explore our motivations. It's the first thing I think about when I experience someone new. What motivates their behavior.

I enjoy composing my thoughts into written forms, like pulling ghosts into jars. I started my day with a walk, I'd like to call it a nature walk, but I think the avenues with their noisome stream of traffic detract a bit from the experience, even though there are trees in their slow reaching poise, moving waters in scintillating skins of light refraction, birdsong in burst staccato.

I often look at the cracked sidewalks like walls, nowadays. When I was a child, I often lie in the grass and would experience a kind of vertigo, like I was clinging to a turf ceiling, with a vast blue abyssal beneath. I remember a class trip to a museum with a great spiraling staircase in an open floor plan, I clung to the railing, sure I would fall up.

When you consider that gravity is not exactly a given, but established by certain parameters of physics that are changing more slowly than we can see and know, clock second hands we cannot follow, it seems less an absurdity. Our day star steadily burns up the hydrogen in its tank, our single accreted moon walks away like a lover after the tryst, galaxies creep close enough to kiss, spacetime is a perspective we experience in a linear, three dimensional Plato's cave, this brain ensconced in skull. We are more absence than atoms. We are always in the now, with a concept of past and future that are more illusory than our cognition will often grasp.

I find a solemn curiosity in rust and ruin, in the bleached skull of stone denuded by migrations of water, across millennia, in starlight measured in backward marches of eons. It is by these comparisons we witness it's passage, a vast cadence of time we're not designed to experience first hand, at least not in this form, by way of our half life senescence, our brief candle wicks crumpling in consuming fires.

A skull of one who once lived still exists. Our gasoline or fossil fuels are the alchemized quick of former life. Ben Johnson is perhaps still standing in his crypt in Westminster. "Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now?" The life of a tortoise or a tree can be longer, if less obvious in terms of kinetic violence.

Anyhow, on occasion I enjoy a riddle in written form, though I always ponder riddles in various other forms. Something like, "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" Have we puzzled that one out. I have several ideas, but they are more like japes than answers. I am less fond of answers than questions, infinitely so. Answers feel like dams, like caps over phantom limbs.

I asked a riddle a while back, do you know the answer? I think why are you here is a better question. I don't need an answer, but I do appreciate the kindness of one, the reach across the gap between us, it is like the reaching fingers on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. All communication strikes me that way, but especially that of art, which seeks to denude the soul.

A friend told me something recently I have been returning to often, like butter melting in a warm pan, I've been letting it settle into the nucleotide chain structure of other concepts I have absorbed. She studies the Tarot and, through its various avatars, the Tarot follows The Fool through life experience. That makes me smile, it strikes me as wonderful honest. To others, we are the roles we play on the stage of their life. I'm a son and caregiver on the daily. The many people I have helped learn to speak and write in English and to attain various collegiate degrees playfully dub me the professor. I have been a friend, a lover, when I align and condense into these reveries I oft sign as R_Sculptoris, The Fire Elemental, O Filos Sou, O Drakos, or more simply The Magician. It is curious, isn't it. How things change with time and perspective. How we change.

The riddle at the beginning really could be anything to you that came to your mind when you began firing up neurons and parsing the avatars of language I arranged for you, like porcelain on a table of tea for two, between us. My intention in it's crafting I'll answer if you guess it right.

Anyhow, burning daylight here. I hope this message finds you, and finds you well.

Written by DanielChristensen

(The Fire Elemental)

Published 16th May 2023

#LifeAsAWriter #philosophical #universe

All writing remains the property of the author. Don't use it for any purpose without their permission.

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