WHAT NATURE TELLS ME

Dedicated to Heinrich Heine

Often after an early supper Gabriel would go for a walk in the nearby meadows by his cottage to clear his head.

Tonight was no different.

The fragrance of spring flowers with young ladies dancing in the tall grass should have made him feel happy but conversely it made him feel tremendously sad. Beauty had this effect on him. It was always when people and things were at their most pure and full of life somehow, unsullied by old age and death, that he couldn't help but think instantly of their demise; for him the two were inseperable, which made him weary of heart. It was as if there was a shadow continually hanging over each one of his rarefied thoughts. "It's damned exhausting to think so deeply about things," he said to his best friend and editor, Sebastian. How he wished he could be a simpleton sometimes, someone who accepted the way things are in a peasant fashion rather than be cursed with the intellectual sack of coals he felt so heavily pressing down on his mind always.

"What a sad predicament it is for humans, so clearly aware are we that one day we must inevitably die," he had written in an article that he'd sold to The London Magazine. "To be so supremely conscious of the transience of existence on this earth and yet try and forget that inescapable truth with so many endless distractions is just one of the many paradoxes of being a human being."

When Gabriel would see farmers and labourers in the fields he didn't doubt the toil they underwent in their daily work, but he also saw a peacefulness in their sense of purpose within the routine cycle of the seasons. What contribution did he make other than to make pompous men similar to himself feel connected to some self evident truths wrapped up in elaborately embroidered language? Not much.

As he walked further along through blossoming fields, he came to the edge of the pine scented, ancient forest which he felt no inclination to explore, rather he found himself a felled log which he sat upon whilst continuing to watch the dancing ladies in the distance. He mused on the perfection of the scene as it occurred to him that the cloak of winter had been discarded for the season of renewal.  

Hearing their merry voices singing and laughing in the distance, he remembered his own wife dancing the same way when they were younger, breathlessly singing in rounds with her friends whilst skipping with great exuberance and flushed faces.

Anna was gone now and Gabriel had subsequently closed his heart to ever loving again.

Only to nature did he now feel he truly belonged, nature that never judged but remained constant in its presence through time.

'Perhaps,' he thought to himself, writing down his thoughts in his leatherbound notebook, "there is something eternal in nature that we fail to remember in our human lives, focusing only ever on our own unique sense of mortality within the span of a single life. Is it arrogance or wilful ignorance?"

Then Gabriel looked up as the lightly swaying tree tops bent ever so slightly to the winds of spring. The dancing women were now headed home through the cow parsley covered fields as the evening sun began to set, its orange light filtering through the branches and illuminating the tips of the bladed grass and wild flower heads all around him.

Although the aloness of Gabriel's personal grief had been tempered by the beauty of nature all around him, he still found tears fall unexpectedly from his eyes onto the pages of his notebook, blotting his notes written in ink.

Observing the words smudged with his own tears, he wondered if that wasn't even more profound a statement than anything he'd written since his wife died.

As he closed the pages of his book before re-opening it, he found it now resembled  perfectly the shape of a butterfly.

Anna loved butterflies.

Gabriel smiled at his thinking like a child again and walked home in the sacred dusk, somehow lighter of heart.