Shangri-La

Paradise didn't come to Sadie, she came to it. And although, when she thought about it, the circumstances were very different, similarities could still be drawn to James Hilton's Lost Horizon: there was a journey which began as planned but ended in an unforeseen destination; there were revelations about her fellow travellers; and there were heated debates over whether to stay or rejoin the revolving world.
Division is never nice, but often necessary.
Some wanted peace, contemplation and beauty, some wanted to be freed from modernity; others wanted all the voyeurism that life had to offer and could barely withstand being without the hurried pace, the noise, the constant distractions, yet among these were a few who didn't know what their Shangri-La was until somehow it came to them or them to it. Providence, Miss Brinklow would have called it.
But then Sadie didn't have a Miss Brinklow in her party, unless she had assumed that character, but she wasn't a missionary nor was she likely to assertively proclaim this situation and her place in it was preordained, even if she did privately indulge this thought. She was the more silent of the circle, only speaking when she was spoken to or when she felt it was necessary, although the latter it has to be said was rare. Her voice was soft and she didn't like to raise it above more assured vocalists or drive inspecting eyes to fall upon her; in fact it caused her much embarrassment if she was asked to increase its volume or to kindly repeat the words she had uttered. Two rose-coloured spots would appear on her cheeks and deepen as she tried to overcome her meekness and comply. Unbeknownst to her, this feature was quite becoming, but it gave Sadie the jitters. She trembled, she tripped over words, and avoided direct eye contact as her face blushed progressively crimson.
A late bloomer was how she would have been described back home, someone who took longer to realise her own worth and beauty, although some to be cruel would say she never bloomed at all like a tight flower bud that despite careful tending fails to open, but here, wherever here was, she blossomed. She forgot about her self-consciousness and just was. Her silences to her felt more comfortable, and her voice when she did speak had a new firmness. And it appeared she wasn't the only one who had noticed this transformation, the others often looked to her for mediation, which as a single woman, who was neither very young or very old and lacked in what could be called standard experiences, she greatly appreciated.
In this restorative place, new as well as more established residents, just liked to be near her; a small band trailed in her wake from one communal room to another which at times she found rather bothersome. In spite of how she truly felt, the Master Healer said, she exuded calm in her aura. And yet she'd only just found this inner peace for herself.
It had been there all this time and she hadn't known.
If the sleeper train hadn't derailed, if she'd chosen to stay put and wait for help, if she and the others she left with hadn't met the John Lennon hippie, if he hadn't led them in single file over a viaduct and into the hills, if they hadn't been cajoled into being winched up the dizzying height of a redwood tree to an oriental tea house in its boughs...
If...if...if....
Then where would she be right now? Still trying to make sense of her drab life?
That's how Sadie used to think; now the ifs, hows, buts and whys have receded over the course of time, along with time itself. Nothing matters here where the air is fresh, where all species of birds wheel overhead or sing the dawn chorus, where nature strips you of any false or protective identity. From this imperious height everything you once worried about falls away. Decays. A chrysalis turns into a butterfly. A snake sheds its skin. Seeds sown long ago are finally watered.
In this tucked away Shangri-La, true nature shines.

Picture Credit: Vintage Travel Japan for Kirishima in Kagoshim Prefecture, The Retreat of Spirits with Japanese Railways c1930s.

The Flame Without

Night after night she held a beacon; held a flame over the waves crashing against the rocks, mimicking what Hero had once done for Leander, except this was centuries later, and she wasn't acting as a guide, but as a seeker. Trying to throw light in dark inlets hoping for a sign, or that she'd recognise exactly what it was she sought.
At first sight, like the love some people claim they've felt for another.
The blindfold would magically lift from her eyes as she realised what was truly in front of her, or she'd feel the pull like that of a magnet and be conducted to the part of her that she knew had for a long time taken leave. The re-discovered piece slotting neatly into her person and not jammed into the chasm. Like a black sheep coming home, assimilated once again into the fold as if they'd never been away.
Gone would be the repetitive Ugly Sister moments where body parts were butchered with a paring knife or cut with a pair of nail scissors so that found donor flesh could uneasily fit and reside on borrowed time. Borrowed because patch jobs only mask the pain of the search, in spite of the faint glimmer of hope they provide at the beginning. A hope which dies when the body refuses to accept the donor flesh, shakes it off as it were a parasite riding uninvited, although in the short-term it's better to be patched than have large black holes of nothing.
Knit one, purl one, drop stitch, drop stitch, drop stitch...
Dark matter, everyone can see and intrude into without asking; conjecturing as they do so as to the cause of your emptiness, your melancholia, your dissatisfaction, and as they probe the openings get bigger and bigger. There goes a kidney...the spleen...part of the intestine...a section of the stomach...a fallopian tube...a lung...a sliver of the heart...a whole breast. The small spaces of flesh lying in-between look like tropical islands. Their jagged shores surrounded by dark vacuous pools, an inky sea that a pen might dip into and write with.
But who, in this case, would be the writer?
Her? The missing part of her? Someone removed from her story? Someone who wanted to write her a new one?
A tattoo of spidery words spilling across her remaining skin and people studying them as they do passing clouds; the pictures that appear compared and analysed. Look, there's a huge somersaulting fish, over there a palm tree and in that hollow a camp fire.
What does it mean?
Why does this person have words materialising as pictures on her body?
Not one of them considering if she wants them to read or stare. Didn't anyone ever tell them it's rude?
But that's just how it is if like her you feel in some way incomplete. You come to accept it and long for a day when temporary fixes will be a thing of the past. You hope, as she faithfully does, for a gradual restoration or a sudden solution, sharp and clear, and when the fog parts, the calmer breeze will blow out the burning light. That eternal flame that was without will finally be within, and nothing how she saw it will be as it was as the time for numbly seeking will be over.
Beings having a human experience call that hope for there is never any assurance that what we think we want will come to pass. Nor is there any certainty that we will know when it is within inches of our grasp or if we will ever attain it. To search is a fickle thing...
And until that search has died a natural death, her light will waver and disorientate men; quite a few will lose their way, entangled in seaweed or dragged under by her tempestuous current, for the flame she holds is not a beacon for mankind but a self-seeking, flickering light.

Picture Credit: Hero Holding the Beacon for Leander, 1885, Evelyn de Morgan

The-Old-Woman-Fairy

Once upon a time, in a far-off land, the Old-Woman-Fairy pointed her wand at the All-Seeing-Eye and firmly pushed the Mute button. Human reality was so much better with the sound killed, and besides her charge was simply exasperating. There she was, looking in the bathroom mirror and working her jaw, her eyelids fluttering and her pupils as large as saucers, as the words she mouthed, although formed as normal, were inaudible; now she held a palm of a hand up to her mouth to feel the tepid air escape from her rapid lips.
“You're not dead dearie,” muttered the Old-Woman-Fairy to the blinking iris, where in the dilated pupil her charge stood transfixed, studying her reflected self with a look of utter bafflement on her oval face.
“Always the same...a dramatic clutch of the throat and terrified eyes...with frantic attempts to speak words in different tones, hum in different pitches, followed by red-faced rage, or a soundless tantrum and heaved unheard sobs...wish one of them would accept it with some semblance of dignity. It is, after all, for their own good.” The Old-Woman-Fairy grumbled as she kept an eye on the All-Seeing-Eye as she at the same time washed up her lunch plates: she'd had Tomato and Basil soup with a cream cheese and cucumber roll and a mug of Builder's tea.
“Anyone would think I did this for fun...,” she continued as she vigorously scrubbed the tea-stained mug and rinsed it under a trickle of cold water, but whether she was referring to the sink of dirty crockery or her job who can say for she commented or made disparaging remarks every single day, yet somehow failed to see the similarity between herself and her charges, and why it was that she had been chosen to temporarily dumb others.
Her attention having wandered, her charge no longer filled the glass eyeball set. Now where had that pale freckled slip of a thing gone to? The Old-Woman-Fairy tutted and tottered up to the blank central dot, “Show me the girl!” She commanded in her don't-mess-with-me voice and thumped it, whereupon its eyelid flickered several times until its tired pupil could again bring into focus the current subject, who was now sitting down but still speechlessly pawing her white throat in disbelief. “Don't you dare doze off on me!” The Old-Woman-Fairy reprimanded the Eye, and possibly the girl although she showed no such signs of doing so.
This particular charge hadn't been placed under the practised gaze of the Old-Woman-Fairy for very long, less than four months, but in that short spell of time, she'd come to know very well this Irish-blooded girl's articulated and unarticulated expressions. And she was infuriating! Never listening to reason, even if it was her own, and so indecisive you wanted to shake her! Even when she was doing nothing of interest at all, her brain was busy: chattering like a crazed monkey as it created obstacles where they were none, pulled apart every minor and major detail, over-identified with the thought of new horizons, worried about trivial items or dug up deeper ones. Silencing her tongue was the only way to put a stop to her over-analysis, and the Old-Woman-Fairy felt, as she always did, a sense of glee upon reaching this conclusion. There were, of course, other ways to silence charges, but muting the voice was by far her preferred method.
But that's not to say she wasn't a kindly Old-Woman-Fairy; the decision was always made in the best interests of her charge, but when all had been said and done, rethought many times over, really what else was there left to think or say. And she plainly didn't have as much patience with these young things having arrived at a wiser age. In her undergraduate years, she'd had more sympathy and had engineered the zapping of their voice bit-by-bit. “I was too soft,” she now said to student fairies to ward them off making the same mistake, “the shock is greater if you take the words right out of their mouth in one fell swoop. Fairy-technology, as you know, has moved on, yet the results are the same for our charges: Being unable to say nothing at all is a distraction tool – it forces humans to stay present.”

Picture Credit: In the midst of a tree sat a kindly-looking old woman by Arthur Rackham