Winter

Because each tiny lattice-work leads to the next. Little fingers of wanting, finding purchase wherever my mind is uneven. They tear my heart apart slowly, like thread-roots tearing concrete. Or again: the fear seeps in like snowmelt. Come nighttime, and the frost, it will freeze and expand and force the strands of flesh apart. Weak, barely perceptible processes, hardly worth resisting, you might think. (Or might pretend?)

Of course, the process happens in reverse as well. Or else we wouldn't be here, would we? The damage mends itself, the torn flesh knits together. A night's sleep or the gleam of a bell work their way in, exactly like that, and transform into a shadow sustenance.

Seven minutes of sitting. A prayer before eating. These things are neither what they purport to be, nor what they appear to be. They are things that work in the cold, dark interior of my heart -- altered, altering.

I have listened too often to sensible people, who live in the sun and talk about the healthiness of water and the joy of growing plants. Why talk to them? I want to talk to the people who come stammering back, dirty and shivering, out of the frozen earth. That's where things change.