A Wandering Mind

It is Sunday again, and often times Sunday seems the most opportune day of the week to go adventuring. It's become a bit of a habit of mine to swing by the church first to offer up some prayerful communiques to the universe (thanks for the life I've found, thanks for not yet crushing me for the sake of an ironic joke...), and then move on to whatever course seems likely. Today I retraced a trail the Dark had just introduced me to, happy to be alone so that I could dawdle as I liked, lost in an interior life rivaled only by Walter Mitty. The workaday world falls away, and there's just the curiosity of what wonder will be around the next bend- a shapely bit of ice, a shaft of light, and always, ever, the sound of the creaking spruce, threatening to fall.

Sadly I am no naturalist. Moss is just so much carpet in the cathedral; a tree a dryad; a bog a place of blonde grass concealing dark waters. Growing up, I devoured folklore, not nature guides. So when on my own, straying from the path takes on new meaning- crossing a bridge entails unseen trolls, and blow downs are evidence of giants, or of vicious winds released from knotted rope. This doesn't mean I literally believe in the host of creatures folksy and mythical, but that I am firmly a fan of imagination. These woods are my Arden; these shores my Illyria.

Walking, and solitary, I can give myself over to it- signs, portents, stories; my head swims in metaphor, and words, always so many words-

So in love with the world was I,
I promised myself I never would die...

Today, as that macabre scrap flashed into my mind (talk about tempting Fate), the rustling thunder of wings burst out of the limbs above my head, and a maddened crow swept toward the thoroughfare: one for sorrow. I had not noticed the black of the bird in the black of the boughs. Taking off so quickly, so close, it sounded like a much bigger bird, an owl, or a hawk- or more birds, a murder.

Is it not a wondrous thing- to be a girl, alone on a path through the darkening woods?