Bliss is not ignorance.
Nor is it out of reach.

*

Lately I find myself lost and adrift. Focus-less. My imagination is a slippery fish; an impossible customer; a comatose painter; a crazed, deaf psychopath.

My genius is buried. I’ve worked on projects, yes. Written copy, munched short stories, taken down poem-moments, shot the breeze with birds, sorted out my taxes and grown weary. Weary of work, weary of spark, weary of both world and the job lot of Humanity itself.

The fathomlessness of the the universe lacks the fairydust of fascination. Every myth drained of power, now nothing but a warning against capriciousness and greed. Like Cinderella, I am encapsulated whole by my own innocence, screaming silently from within the crystalline past. A mime, completely captured. A native’s soul squashed onto film.

Perhaps I have no soul left. Perhaps that remains to be seen.

*

Enter — dreadlocked and wild like some village mystic — the storyteller: tramping each day the length and breadth of our common, pavemented paradise and praying that some karmic impulse might take her for its own (I never could resist a story).

I talk to plants. Words drip off my tongue like water, ripening strawberries to a deep, juicy red. Animals follow me for miles after chance, investigatory meetings. I’ve been known to pull notebooks out of a Marks & Spencer’s hedge while exchanging pleasantries with an errant blackbird.

Sometimes I stop dead in the street: frozen. Statuesque. Listening.

I traveled the world in search of true meaning, spending years studying to discover the ‘whys’ of the universe. After all that, you might expect I’d have an enriching secret to share, but it is only this: our common creative heritage pays homage to impartial truths, expressing all the questions and answers we so hastily narrow down to bullet-points and books.

There is a vastness to share, an extra-dimensional universe. . . so many things to transform. To change.

Ancient powers are at work here, in the midst of our beggared youth, our obelisks to acquisition, our dizzy pin-point politics. Every day they go unnoticed — but not always.

by Kate Gough, 2016