Wild Words Competition Runner-up: Michael Forester

One of two runners-up in the Winter Solstice 2021 Competition…

Moon

And oh, how you climbed. One trudging step after another, stumbling, near sightless in the darkness below the tall scots pines, fighting the urge to turn and head back down to the lush valley below. And the light, there’s no forgetting the light, is there? The light of the moon that shone through only where there was a clearing in the trees, where the fissures of the volcano burned your feet as much as it burned their roots. But even as your soles blistered, you were glad, because it was only the light that prevented your soul from blistering; the light that kept insisting, ‘Yes, it’s worth it. Keep going. You’re nearly there.’ And then, quite suddenly, you were once again wrapped in the darkness under the trees, the darkness that seemed hell bent on making you turn back.

But you didn’t turn back, did you? You knew that what lay at the end of this quest was pure gold and you knew you would have to sacrifice everything to get to it. So for all those days and nights you climbed, driven on by nothing more than the stubborn certainty that the goldfield, spoken of in travellers’ whispers, lay above you. Guided by the scribbled maps of the dead, you pressed on, knowing only that you had to climb if your life was to mean anything at all.

And then it happened. Finally, you emerged above the treeline. You remember how the excitement rose in you, don’t you? How your heartbeat quickened with the certainty that, yes, this was it, this was the place you had sought all your life. You forgot your aching muscles and your exhaustion, you forgot your torn ragged clothes and the shoes, all but falling from your feet because this was your destiny, for you were the chosen of the Holy One.

You cast your eyes about you, certain in your naivety that it would be lying there in great nuggets, strewn over the ground as far as you could see, waiting for you, only you, to pluck it from the ground and hold it aloft, so that the ones far below you would catch its glint and marvel at your talent, the prowess that set you above them all.

Except it wasn’t like that, was it? As you glanced about, turning this way and that, you saw no gold. The disappointment rose, palpable, inside you, commuting to incredulity and anger until you let out a great wail, raging your aphorisms at the heavens. “Where is it? Where’s my gold? You promised me it would be here. Why have you brought me all this way for nothing? How could you do this to me?”

But no Deity spoke and no gold answered.

Your head drooped in disappointment. You were not the greatest among men, the favoured one, the blessed of the Deity. You were the most gullible, the most foolish, the one most easily deceived by crusty legends on the tongues of worthless drunkards.

How long did you let the despondency wash over you, those great waves of self-pity crashing on the shores of your super ego? How many nights, how many days, how many springs and summers did you wallow in your wretchedness? How many times did you turn, thinking to stumble back down through the dark forest to the ease of life in the green valley, where you could wrap your self-inflicted wounds in the social bandages of congregation?

How long did you sit there, staring at that hole in the ground, until the realisation dawned? Until you finally understood that you were in the right place after all. That the whispered legends and yellowing maps were all true. Until you accepted that this was indeed the place where gold lay.

For the gold was there, alright, but was only to be found by those willing to go down into the heat of the mountain, where the sunlight does not penetrate, where in midwinter you still swelter, where you have to hack at the walls with hammer and pick, chipping off the clods of earth to reveal the seams hidden beneath, where you have to muscle your way, and sweat your way, and graft your way, deep, deep into the mountain, until you think you’re going to die from the heat and your blood is going to boil inside your thumping heart, and your arteries are going to sever and pump that aortic blood out through your chest, flushing the dross from you until you can see those seams and chip away at those nuggets , hauling them out into the cold moonlight of mid-winter to pan your fingers to the blue in those ice-trapped streams, until the moonlight catches on the metal and finally, finally, finally it sparkles before you.

By the time you’d work it out, by the time it had happened, you were ruggedized by the work, hoary handed, calloused of feet and knee. You had passed well beyond the dreams of wealth and ease, the visions of fame and adulation. None of it meant anything any more. You’d seen the mirage for the figment of self-indulgence that it had always been.

You wanted that gold now, for one reason only: to give it back to the one to whom it had always rightfully belonged. And as you laid it out on the ground, a libation waiting to be claimed, flowers on the feet of the Deity, you realised that all the climbing and the mining, the hauling and the panning, all that single-minded, undistracted commitment and all that bleeding on the feet of the moon: this was always the calling; an act of pure worship.

So now she smiles and accepts your offering, while in the valley, far below, they are pacing in impatient circles, catching fleeting glimpses of your offering as it flashes in the grey light. And those wolves, those wolves are baying at the moon.

On the Writing Process…

Once, in millennium not long before this one, I lived in a Forest.; in that Forest, I had a garden - a place of pristine borders and sculptured lawns, of clean swept paths and leafy arbours. There, I wrote in words as manicured and kempt as my garden itself of marketing and finance, the acquisition of profit and the display of gold.

Then came Forest Rain.

The monsoon deluged upon my garden, unrelenting and irresistible, sweeping away my soil and submerging my pathways. Finally, I was forced to abandon that irrecoverable desolation and walk away into the Forest. Here, as worlds circled about me and eternities passed within me, I learned to value being over doing, awareness over animation, gradually coming to see that there was another way to live and another way to write.

The dryads of my Forest taught me that to write wild words, I needed to walk in wild places, seeking out the space where only the emptiness speaks. And there my words became elemental as I wrote of that which is raw and vital.

I released those words upon the wind, allowing it to carry them where it willed. Sometimes they took root and grew strong upon elevated crags, where visionaries see beyond the valley of this incarnation. More often, they blew into the shadows of dark caverns, where disciples of the light apprentice their insight.

There were wolves, of course. There will always be those who howl at the moon when you seek refuge in the silence; the ones who do not see that lightning strikes soundlessly, only later to be given its voice by the thunder. They cannot understand that it is only the emptiness that speaks souls into flame.

So now, where the waters run deeper the words are fewer. For I have learned that if you wish to lay your gold at the feet of the moon, you must walk by her light, permitting her to succour and nurture you in the silence, only in the silence.

Michael Forester is a deafened author of inspirational non-fiction, metaphorical fiction and poetry. He lives in Hampshire, UK, between the New Forest and the sea. His books, including Forest Rain and Forest Dawn, are available on Amazon.