Saturday 24 December 2011

Home

Winter white trees in a landscape of black and white in a place called home. Only the warmth shining from a house here and there is lighting up the countryside. This is a world without shadows. There are only contrasts from what’s here and there, nothing more, nothing less.
It’s a place born out of stillness, and some how it feels like it never started moving. The grey cluds are holding the villages and the forest in a firm grip to protect the creatures from the sun that barely manage to climb the horizon.

When I breathe I get a mild sensation in my nostrils of sticky cold from the lowlands blended with moisture from the ocean.  It reminds me of when I was a kid.

Yes, this is my roots, and I can sense the wave of memories wanting to overtake me behind every corner. But I’m trying to be strong; I don’t want to plunge in to the stream of remembrance and thought. It is here that I want to be, in this moment, and I want to enjoy the sensations of now, because they will pass sooner than later. Time is always short.

In between every grand adventure life takes me on, I want to land, it only for a day – where the seed of all dreams where planted.

I want to dive in to the familiar feelings and grasp the sensation of belonging to something. And even though external adventures are almost practically impossible in this choked winter landscape, that for me is standing still – I immerse myself in to an inner journey tasting of calm, distress and joy, half eaten by the rats and mice of time.

But I have to be fair to this place. In the greyness of tediousness my dreams galloped in the opposite direction and lifted me, took me away. In a world that meant nothing to me as a child I created my own little utopia and saved up the energy, just like a little boy saving up for his first bike, to someday fly to where I belonged.

Nowadays I thrive when I’m back home. I lean in to the past and I give a loving smile to that boy I once knew. I’m kind of proud of him.

Now though, everything has changed. What was once a prison leading to dreams of escape is now only a winter landscape dressed in grey.  When it doesn’t try to hold me back, I can see the beauty of it all and the meaning other people find in it.

I can see the beauty in a landscape of black and white, with warmth and love shining from houses in the cold; the beauty of the memories from the past or from the low clouds giving the countryside a hug, somehow trying to substitute the sun.

Contrast, cold, feelings of emptiness, memories once again trying to sneak in and a prison wall with marks from my escape. The old feelings have vanished. What’s left is only what I once called home.

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