Intro to Surien

I raised my head toward Surien. How it bared its twisted iron shell across the sky, perched in heaven like a black crown of thorns. I wondered at the people who created such a vessel. What must have driven them to leave the comfort of their planet and construct their new home from rocks they found in the desert of space. I thought about Palinan and if we might do the same if our planet's currents ever slowed.

As I got closer, i could make out some of the larger pieces that had been fused to the hull in a rush. And as we drew closer I could make out more and more of them until I couldn't count them anymore. It was ugly but altogether a marvelous feat of astronomical engineering. The crown of ten thousand asteroids stood before me, with vastness greater than my imaginination could ever produce. This was home for a great many people, and I would soon be among them.

Tawn

I write to you with beams of light.
And they have become a ritual.
I've learned to crave each glimpse of you
Between the accreting stars.

When shimmer swindlers beckoned for the sun you gave me,
I gave myself to them instead.
You had always given me enough and more.

Now empty-handed, my fists are full of the medium we swim within.

I beg the heavens for something improved but I find less at every turn.

I write to you with beams of light.
And now, from this other side, 

I can see what you have seen. 

I only wish you were here to tell me about it.

It's you, the one the night calls friend,

You, the girl with faceless dreams.

Perch yourself beside the moon

And you will see the girl I see.

Who can wake you as a rose

Nodding kindly with the wind?

The trees will find their fingertips

Before you bare your breast to them.

My fingers beat upon the table

Against the grains of time and space.

I watch you dancing in the minefields

And pray one day you'll find this place.

The Jiyu

    I wished my old tree good morning as I rustled my way through its branches and set my back down on the slope that its trunk had been building. The sunlight had just begun to lift the dewdrops, slowly making room for the songleaves around them to transform the new morning breeze into the music of the spirits.

   You cannot hear the first note of a jiyu's song. There is no grand entrance or catchy hook. It's more like a choir of thousands of distant voices all entering and exiting at different times with their pre-ordained notes. When you start to hear the song, you realize that it's been singing for a while, only your mind was not clear enough to focus on it. No mind has been or will ever be clear enough to know which of a jiyu's leaves sang first. Only the tree can know, and it will forever keep it secret.

Gutta Cavat Lapidem

That night, I went through my usual walk through the gas-lit tunnel that ferried me across the river between two lives. There was water dripping from the ceiling onto the mortared stone floor and it reminded me of a stone engraving from the barrows of our ancestors. "Dripping water hollows the stone". And as I walked alone in that desolate place, transfixed to the plip of the seeping groundwater, I pondered which of my lives was becoming the stone and which the water.

From up there, at the top of the sky, I could see - I mean actually see - the thousands of miles of water transforming and dissipating and collecting again. I could see the rocky earth and the countless trees and blades of grass borne upon its back, bathing in the warm starlight of sol. All this magnificence that was living and breathing, turning the soil and drinking the air: I could feel inside myself a part of every organism that was or is or will be a part of it. And only then could i hear the voice that had long been whispering to me who it was I would become.