Recalibration

Artwork by Vikki Kindermann

Leaves are rustling, it’s happening again.

It can be in the still of early morning where it’s loudest, a pre-dawn chatter between the folds of night where souls are at their busiest. The depth and frequency varies on the adjustment needed, but it’s an ever reliable constant, much like time, birth and death, night and day.

At its most poignant, it comes in silvery streams that cry a life of gold where no matter how hard or often you wipe the sparkly streaks away, they reappear at some other time as absolute as the Earth rotates to stir the tides every lunar day.

It rouses a fullness on constant fill to overflow gilded cups, stirring days of lost and nights of long in mirthful cackle billowing from jiggling bellies. It’s part of that knowing of always knowing.

Reliability. Dependability. A longing for one near and far away too.

Those silvery streams glimmer to the centre of soul and out again, swoon in the one adored, captivated in the oscillation of connection. The tears, the hoots, the aches and fill of completeness. Unseen and yet always the whispers, out of sight but never out of mind.

An ease of honest, fearless in the crisp autumn. Words spoken without being heard reverberate to the epicentre of all the universes. Inflections in tone and cadence of understanding swill between souls to cinch in a thousand spikes and hook in firm, as essential as earth, water, wind and fire.

For now, it’s time to recalibrate. To the new, the next, the uncharted. There’s no start or end, simply a recalibration in a surge of ebbs and peaks.

In a world of constant movement and modification, reshaping and revamping, the trick is to find the steady, the temporary oasis from the necessary paradox, even when considered senseless contradiction.

Whether in a babbling brook of broken tears or rhythmic pounding of pavement, strumming musical strings or tapping a keyboard.

The soft shuffle of a ball while missing in thought or floating long enough in ocean currents to marvel at gentle swimming turtles and ancient coral inching for sunlight, long enough to wonder about the secrets slammed shut in the 100-year-old giant sea clam.

Be open to the angels with invisible wings that care for the broken and wounded, watch over the outcast and vulnerable. Always guiding what is and what will be in a tenderness that only angels possess, and yet in a mighty bite armoured in bronze.

Even kittens chasing butterflies in a field of cream gardenias and buttery buttercups will collapse in a snoring heap, in need of recalibrating.