Home

There I was, walking down English hill and plain. A man in this incarnation. No face to put to name or vice versa. But what drew me, what distracted me from the clanging sword in hilt at my hip and sore feet of journeys unpartnered by paths, was the heavenly voices of those indoctrinated elders and poor eunuch boys. I could see the dilapidated fortress of my yearning in the distance and knew already that my patience was written on it’s walls. There was no horse for me to spurn forward nor soldier to order my advance. I was.alone.

A thing of beauty was in the air despite the absence of sunshine to light such obvious portraits. I was granted passage under cloud blanketing cloud, as is the English thorn and in one such as me it’s patriot rose.

This is as far as I have ever gone before, coming up to castle wall without guard, and subsequently without Duke or Lord whom by privilege are beginning their fat rich patronage to Normandy for annual imbuement’s, sport and such. ‘Who would want to enact such a cowardly escape from this innate beauty?’ I ponder as steeple and stained cracked saints begin to loom above me close.

Now it begins, the dissolution of mine self, a languid melting of forward sensation, the ones in which I would need at my feet for my current survival, for as we know battle is an indiscriminate mistress. But I let them flow out of me and maintain auditor and orator. Such senses I am grateful for now. I would serve them feasts and bid them farewell with gold and willing maidens if it so pleased them for now they are pleasing me with their reception of angelic muse and I am now fully encompassed, I am lost, back to childhood or forward to my ascension into mystery and death and life and all is around me!

Such voices! How could they be of this earthly realm? How can it be that thine own reception of them has not left you blind and deaf to the ground and usual… and mine also! Such fluid, golden speech and where is God? Where is Aphrodite even in her vanity, the old gods? can they not hear atop their perches of judgement and ascendancy what masterly and holy voice sends from those whom they have created to do so? Perhaps, being of such grandiosity innately then, to them it is not but meagre  voice or whisper of no account. But this time, and at this only time I am bent to beg them dine on my humility and sup of my gratitude for it is real and true and does to me not even what kingship or wizardry or even the most seductive harem of all the world could do. Any comparison made in prose to this chanting divinity would pale with any words I could use to describe them.

It is coming into my awareness now that I have seated myself, a high looming statue of the virgin mother on my right in my peripheral. These… idols mean naught to me in themselves. Nor do I worship this new patriarch and his brethren. I can read and have, with open mind pondered these new and strange conflicting philosophies of man through the divine. But I keep to myself on these matters to avoid conflict, broken loyalties and even dangerous and speculative inquisition. I keep to myself about most things, even the angelic verbiage and tone ascending from the scaffolds above an unfinished chapel in the middle of warring lands. 

I am nudged by distraction to notice around me. And I hear… an appraising audience come from nature. What a validating and worthy denouement. Thunder storm and rain! And rain hitting stained windows in it’s vain attempt to wash the hypocrisy of the saints among the portraits. Song is ending now. I get up and walk to the back wall where there is a hopeless and dusty carafe begging to see but a single coin. I drop my worn alms just as man and monk make their rickety way down the scaffold and their respective aisles.

Lastly, as I exit said holy of houses the English sky opens charitably with rainbow in full among the last surviving raindrops and dark grey of the storm. All this a portrait as sky sits without apology on rolling green and it is miles and miles before the next wall or house may welcome me. But no distance or time is needed as I take my path on fields spread across country, touching the world that stretching farther and farther towards angelic muse, brings me to where I already want to be.

Home.