Under Moonlight

At night I inhabit a clandestine world.  Under moonlight I sneak into the garden and allow my senses to take over.  Tactile sensations are what I crave.  My nostrils begin to flare as my eyes adjust to the tableau I see before me.  I open my arms wide, feel the coolest of breezes against my cheek, my neck, floating between the buttons of my shirt.  Were there ever such blissful kisses from lovers?  Perhaps.

 

Kneeling on the grass, I smell the musty odor of earth, rock, fungus, mold. Life.  My fingers dig into the soil, lifting rocks, pebbles, fallen leaves, flowers gone to seed, earthworms.  The breeze is getting stronger now.  Little gusts lift my hair into the wind, to fall down again against my cheek in an impish tickle.  While the world sleeps I am in my own dreamtime.

 

So into the garden, under moonlight is where I go when I need to remember that anything is possible, that life lingers on, that I, too am life.  Ten years ago I said goodbye to my brick prison of florescent lights, climate control and synthetic fibres.  Goodbye to the sad souls that trudged in each morning at eight and trudged out again at five.  And goodbye to the slow, steady, death of me. 

 

Under moonlight I am a mirror of north, south, east and west. I am a worthy player in this cycle of birth and rebirth, I am as majestic as the oak above my roof, the screeching owl in the night sky, the nightjar catching insects on the moonlit road. 

 

I am as endless as the spider that spins its web on my windchime, as beautiful as the star-filled heavens and as luminous as the moon.  I am as smooth and rounded as the river pebbles that crunch beneath my feet and as abundant as the tightly closed blossoms on the calistemon tree.