It is the day before Christmas. I acknowledge the nature of the season…

I’m on the island again, merely for a day — a whole day.

I suppose that I’ve been up, wandering, since about 3.30am; it’s been blowing, howling — in advance of celebrations I suppose — like a banshee, but lovely…to my reckoning.

Candles are wafting their light, flickering in the occasional breeze, which comes in from somewhere, forced, perhaps, in the galeforce.

I’ve stood out there. And felt the stinging rage of the wind-rain.

I found a bat yesterday. I was moving and sorting wood, and there it was, this tiny furred ball, almost unrecognizable as a living thing. I’m guessing hibernation, but hard to know. It called out in the rasping screech, tiny and delicate as it tried to move, in awakening, from a long resting. Why, really, it could’ve been hibernating, I don’t know; it’s not now cold enough to shut down for the winter. But, there was some chill earlier in the season — so perhaps here the casting to the silence of winter.

I moved it with my gloves, the screech continuing — and the tiniest claws, so minuscule, as there was slow clamoring to get away from the awakening. I set it further away, protected beneath board, leaf and stone.

Whether, in the midst of this, there will be a return to sleep is
unknown, so remote is this new place of rest.

I think about the metaphor, of this unsubtle arising. I think we are all awakened to new experiences, and whether we roll over to return to our slumbers, or arise in this opening; therein, the query, the answer, the step.

In any unsettling, I am quick to rise. Whether, however, I rise calmly…is another matter.

Another matter…

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