The Edge of reason

She Sleeps!

Kiyoshichan, my wonderful niece stayed with me last night. She is beguiling and charming and such a joy and great fun to be with as we play in the park and she describes with such eloquence the wonders of everything around her. Things amazingly that I seem to have forgotten and that dare to pass me by unnoticed. She is the dance of the butterfly and the drifting fragrance of flowering Ajisai and tsubaki. She is the orchestra of birdsong and the fine hazy moist touch of the spray from the fountain.

When we are small our whole world is our safe, soft and comfortable home and the homes of our relatives and pre school and the car in between them all. The world is not much more and in fact it doesn't really need to be. We are simple surface dwellers without depth but content with our Mother's company and she provides all we need. But as we grow our horizons are pushed back and our vision widens encompassing so much more. The human condition of curiosity almost programs us to learn whatever can be learned, to absorb and to assimilate and we sit and learn such things of history and geography. We learn the sciences and philosophies and arts and religious interpretations, we learn what we need to function as an adult and slowly take our place in a much bigger world. Slowly then as the innocence of our childhood slips into yesterday the little world we once regarded with simplicity evolves into a much greater entity. It becomes a model in our mind of exquisite structure and of fine detail masterfully crafted into intricate ornate design. A multitude of intertwined complexities but with logic, rule and order that adheres to all we were ever taught. Of course we are open to new idea's because without such potential progress and room for growth then we would fall into stagnated routines and become unmoving marbled statues lining a pathway to what could have been with vision, like the worshipped icons of past Gods chiselled, decorated and forgotten.
So we wake up everyday and walk our paths of life safely equipped with our mental map of how the world and all within it works. The little mechanisms whirring away like the contented purring of a cat feasting upon salmon but what of the secret things?

There are so many secrets that cover us like a soft sprinkling of glitter. Every morning the sun rises and pulls us away from dreams and we live the day and then the romantic evening arrive and we watch it fall into the West and hide from the night. This neatly fits into that model of the workings of the world we hold dearly but what of coincidences and miracles and the happenings of unlikely events? Divine intervention some would say. They don't happen with the almost clockwork regularity of the march of the heavens and so stand out as something that doesn't quite fit into our regimented order. What of love? I'm sure it cannot exist as pure as it does should it be placed under the microscope of the sterile scientific labs. It needs the pulse of poets and people to live it, breathe it and experience it in its glorious invigorating filling of our hearts.

I loved walking in the echoing corridors of organised order and knowing everything had its place and I dutifully put everything where it belonged into their correct little niche's and categorised holes. But everything that I was ever taught left hardly any room at all for the magic and the mysteries of esoterical clandestineness.

As late evening arrives and I relax with a drink and Puccini massages my being with the aria of Madame Butterfly, I close my eyes. I slowly drift and my imagination fuelled by the romantic notion of poets and the ideas of philosophers so diverse that their stanzas and theories often fall from my mental world model, propel my soul into such mystic realms where the warmth and acceptance is a tantalizing and tangible taste once more like Mothers embrace when we were so young. The people I have loved and now lost to this world are close and radiate joy in empathic waves that fill my soul with such peace that one rarely finds outside in the real world.
When I open my eyes again I know that it is lost to my touch and the emptiness is apparent but I know there are secret doors hidden in the fabric of this world just waiting for us to step through. Doors to worlds where flights over rainbows and spellbound sorcery are as common as aeroplanes and spreadsheet calculations are in this one.

When we are with children take a look into their eyes and know in your heart that they still contain the magic that so many of us lose as we grow up.