Taking Nature Inland

by DynamicEquilibrium115

Taking Nature Inland

The last stop on our journey to the coast where we loped along, deciphering the networks of signs and roadmaps, was where the farmer had stopped us to chat. The earthbound equine, turned out to be an artist, hard hooves prodding sleeping seeds in shallow soil as if to create life once more, moving from dirt and hoe to chisel and carving knife. We fluttered gracefully alongside him above the trail, hard stones and flattened loam denied contact of our bodies, the earthly trotter took little notice, his confident stride pushing him forward, the day passing on. The younger sister’s watch begins, the eye of Celestia descends into the landscape, gems of the great galaxy fill our view, put to shame by Luna’s luminous orb. The farmer keeps going as we prepare to break till the new day light visits our faces, he leaves but expects us tomorrow, our destination will receive us then, for now we rest.

Next day, passing the heavily overgrown spot where he’d said we’d find his studio, we parted the brush and found the sea. There lay exactly the fathoms of our imaginations, splinter wood farmhouse maintained only with love and determination, bare hoof restored with glass in places where wood had given in, all the better, he explained, to see the whales he could depend on, like treasure hunters seeking antiques.

In his studio, countless artistic works of oak and birch origin line the shelves and occupy each empty space, solidly sculpted chunks of lumber sawn off like slices of bread, lacquer glazed over them by hoof as they sit in the sun, new scents carried by the wind like a freshly baked pie and signs of the soul within carved lines, the mesmerizing patterns which one’s gaze falls over, lifting away with rhythms of one’s own choosing.

“They are imperishable,” he boasts, telling of souvenirs sold to seafarers whose vessel floundered in nature’s fury far out at sea, the mementos of the forest washing up intact on the shore days later like the treasure of a pirate galleon banished to the ocean floor many decades ago, uniquely present among a long lost wreck. The trees of this forest are special, he says, the body of a jungle encapsulated by ever expanding civilization, one of the last jewels on the land, his efforts a preservation of its spirit, immortalized in his works.

We buy two, one for each of us, and they have proved resilient, the intricate designs still clear, the smoothness of their finish undiminished over years, even now, far inland from the sea where salt air might be expected to provide a far memory of the whale’s siren and their faithful observer. Your focus lifting from a book, smells of the ocean filling nostrils as you admire, eyes circling above free as sky borne love, dense as a lover’s heart, enduring as the tide pulling me to you.