Fleeting Flourish

Sitting on the edge of the boulder at the edge of the mountain.

A bundle of flowers at my hip. A feather pinned in my hair. Paint spots of various colors on my fingers. Crimson blood is surrounded by ivory scratch on my shin, evidence that the woods are growing careless.

The height makes me giddy when I look and the shadows from the steadily lowering sun stretch out across the grazing fields. Shafts of livening light press down onto the hills from around and between the clouds stretched horizontally below the sun. They seem to hold the delicate layers up like massive fingers or table legs.

The low rumble of train wheels on track reaches my ears seconds before I see the cars' slow, trailing way through banks and smatters of trees.

Peach tints mix with pillow blue as the light plays with the clean smoke from fall burn piles. Natural, healthy smoke. Under control. Safe. Not at all like the hill-and-sky engulfing haze that would take control on the Rez. Black pillars. Foreboding loss and hopelessness.

Here I can breath in. Press out my stomach to fill it with air. No one to judge. No need to fit into society's "beautiful" bracket. I can squint my eyes, wrinkle my nose, and skew my mouth in an effort to see through the hills...to see what's beyond them.

The clouds are a much thinner gauze around the sun now than they were moments ago. My eyes grab too much light and are rewarded with glaring blue orbes.

"You are the sun...shining down on everyone"

Sara Groves' soft voice echoes over and over in my mind as the sun sets, dragging its vivid tangerine cloak behind it with a flourish. Even more beautiful is that God's beauty is constant...not at all fleeting like this earthly beauty.

Already dark is falling and the breeze has become cold. Only a sliver remains which is now gone. The orange is lingering, but ever so slowly fading to purple and then blue.