A Golden Leaf

[thoughts from   ~ burning woman ~  by Sha'Tara]

A long, slim leaf, still bearing the colors of Fall blew into the basement entrance inside the house. I'm pretty sure it was a willow leaf. I saw it there, limp and wet but being occupied with the immediate and necessary task of removing rain vestments, boots and other warm winter clothes I didn't remember to sweep the leaf up.  So it stayed on the cement floor, in the furnace room.  Later that night I could still see it in my mind.  Mostly yellow, with brown spots.  Pointed at both ends and almost perfectly straight.  It was about 4 inches long.  I don't know why I remembered that particular leaf: many have blown in on the blustery winds we have experienced of late.

 The next morning, as I turned the lights on and entered the furnace room, I saw the leaf. It had dried up during the night and curled itself into a perfect circle, a golden ring on the floor. 

I'm sure there is a scientific explanation for this transformation.  And to the unobservant eye, it's just what is.  But to an observer this is a real miracle.  Not just that a wet leaf, in drying, would curl itself into a perfect ring, but the thought of 'why' does it happen in that particular way?  Going back to some theoretical beginning, say, of the willow tree that bore those leaves, did someone, some creative entity, design it in just that way, so when the leaf dried it would curl up into a ring?  Perhaps this creating being was marooned here, on planet Earth, and this ring reminded her of home, or of a lover who once wore her golden ring?  So she made trees that bore leaves which, upon drying would leave thousands of golden rings upon the ground.  Then she would pick up one of those rings, slip it on her finger and cry her heartbreak for days and days.  Perhaps she died there, among her golden rings. 

There is never a single, cut and dried, explanation for anything.  Everything carries within itself the Mystery of its beginning.  As does everyone of us.  We don't know.  Now there's nothing wrong with not knowing but what saddens me the most is that creatures as intelligent as Homo Sapiens would take so little care to ponder their beginnings, for I now understand enough about life and 'parallels' to realize that we have countless beginnings.  We do not 'come from' just one place.  We are not just one person, living one short life to some meaningless end (and I would add, knowing what I know that whether we end up in heaven or in hell it is just as meaningless), never to be heard of again.  We could tell a thousand stories of how we began; a million stories of how we got here.  And still, our book would not even have one page written. 

The day after I saw the golden willow leaf ring on the floor, I searched for it but it was gone.  Again, I'm sure there's a simple explanation for that: being dried up and much lighter, it blew away into some dark corner when the furnace blower cut in.  Such an explanation would satisfy most people… and pass me another beer, Sam.  But it does not satisfy me.  I can 'see' this golden ring rising up and floating through the wall and out. It rises up into the sky and next thing I know, there it is, around the full moon rising over there in the east.

We need common sense and we need logic in order to make it through a life on Earth.  But we don't need to be bound by such limiting concepts, do we.  We are endowed with imagination.  We just need to bring that out of the realm of 'fiction' and give it at least as much legitimacy as the other things we believe in so dearly, yet clearly do not fulfill us, satisfy us or even make us one bit happier.  I know now that 'intelligence' is not determined by a fortuitous birth, education or belief systems.  It is shaped by our imagination and dreams, and where these are relegated to childish fantasies you will find a society that is hypocritical and predatory; a society sick with boredom and platitudes and destroying itself.