Wings

Bristles against a coarse canvas, you’ve dabbed a mixture of white and pink and flipped your board on a landscape, back resting against an easel.

What direction should you spread your wings on this ending dusk?

Weightless, like a drop of dew in a rising day. There’s no need to rush – time goes fast enough as it is and there’s just too little for savour. If you don’t feel for every second, you’ll miss the gentle gestures that nature uses to caress her creatures awake.

Take a long, drawn breath and close your eyes slowly. Seconds become hours, hours become years. You have all the time in the world to breathe. The sweet yet taut scent of decaying foliage beneath your feet; the sickly odour of honeysuckle; the gentle allure of oak.

Good morning.

Let your chest contract your lungs on its own – there’s no need to force anything through. Seraphic choirs of bells far in the distance, slowly singing chords in synchrony with the waking birds, accompanied with light percussion of leaves against the wind and rustling as chipmunks move their way through bushes. Your eyes still closed, a steady stream of air through your nostrils, you feel the light chill spread from your nose, down the nape of your neck, down your spine and dissipating down your calves. Soon, your wings will be readied.

Let your conscience clear its own. All the voices and noises you hear in the city – the racing cars, the sirens of dying people, the angry screaming of protesting – it’s time to tune them out into evanescence. They do not exist in this dimension. Arms spread, gentle sweeps of silk-like wind and brushes of pollinating dandelions race through your fingers into gentle oscillations, creating rivets that lightly collide against the back of your wings. Hair like muted wind chimes, dancing in the open air.

A full 5 seconds has elapsed, but pay no attention to time. Clocks have frozen nearly to a halt, but allow just enough of a rate to animate you.

You are elevated and clear. Undefined and unknown. Unborn and almost unconscious.

Let go.

Let go of everything you have. Your aspirations, your dreams, your love, your careers, your passions, your lust. Your anger, your fears, your pain, your enemies, your scorn, your gluttony. Let it all go, and you will be weightless. Feel the fizz in your mind and your body, radiating from your eyes down to your throat. Do not swallow – doing so will stop the stream of air. Your hands – are they hands? – are prone and open. There is nothing to hide here; there is nothing to show. There is nothing keeping you standing. Let the wind

push your back

endlessly into what almost feels like a never-ending abyss. But do not be frightened – you’ve let that go already. Let the faster stream of air propel your further into time, waving inwards towards your chest. Do you feel breathless?

There is no bottom you will hit. Just darkness from your closed eyes.

Now gently

flap your wings.

Even if you never had wings before, you will know what it feels like at this point.

Open your eyes.

What do you see?