Green Pomegranate

The bus clips along the winding mountain roads towards the base. The windows are laced with fog and dew drops, making my vantage point a tiny patch of glass that I’ve wiped off with my palm. As soon as the fog vanishes, tiny droplets appear on the surface and begin attracting new fog around them. The landscape is familiar, yet mysterious. Towering rock faces, blanketed in miles of arching bamboo stalks; that hang their sleepy heads while their spines reach emphatically for the sky. Rolling carpets of mist that drape themselves lazily over depressions in the topography. Trickling streams that fumble over boulders and pebbles, just to fall together in a violent surge through the goose-necked canyon. Every morning I survey the same terrain and wonder to myself, what magic lies there behind the shroud of what is visible; existing in the intangible; never to be known or discovered by me. I catch myself consumed in my inner sanctum, as bronzed rays of light explode over the ridge and bath the passengers in vibrant optimism. I’m fully back in the moment; loving the subtle promises of that morning light. Wondering what beauty awaits each one of us. Then I have pause to remember...last night on my walk home from the market, laden heavily with my bounty...how I was stopped entirely by a wistful violin and the ominous swelling of a grapefruit blood moon.