The Walk M. E. Riddle

The black and white bugs scampered into the muddy fringe where cultivated lawn meets underbrush. “What else inhabits the dense land?” I wondered. Every step I took on my backyard walk provoked questions despite how I tried to be present in the moment.

Swathes of vibrant green groundcover resembling lily pads blended into the lawn. The herb grew vertically up a fence and horizontally across the grass. I chewed a healing leaf. Moving forward, the earth beneath me squished from a recent rain. The sound pleasant and the scent of moist ground heady… toes, wet. A low branch parted my hair. Shade lay beneath the tree, cooling, while dappled sunlight toasted yellowing grass and exposed skin. A peephole in a peeling fence framed a not quite ripe fig alone in a tangle of vines.

Despite the beauty, I struggled to relax, to enter the wordless state inhabited by intuition, colors and shapes, my indigenous home. Where was the portal to that place I once occupied? My zone where visions are collected and comforted only turning into words when necessary. A space where philosophy arises, and in time, threads its way into written passages or paintings that tell spectacular secrets. A world where flocks of black birds and gusts of wind prompt revelations. Like the day when the ragged silk flag, aged by weather, flapped primal messages through the open door as I lay on the couch staring. Or when I would sit in the sunny patches on the hardwood floor in my childhood home. I spent the day following the warm puddles of light until dusk. The sun spoke to me and had much to say. What use to the world were these missives? Peace would not be won by following the sun. Prose would not heal poverty or rebuild broken homes. Yet, how could I keep these dispatches to myself? Images, my native alphabet, are fading like hieroglyphics. I might evaporate once my language is gone. Into the puddle of sun or the muddy fringe.

Lola Michele Young-Stone