Ashes and Dust

Here on the broken wasteland between understanding and utter insanity, a hollow silence prevails. The eyes, while open, see only a pale illusion of what is real. The ears, forever listening, hear nothing save a whispered lie. Shrouded within the misty veil of misperception, the Crafter of the Castle sits quiet amongst the rocky waves of time. Great cities and golden dreams loom transparent in the haze, broken and abandoned, to leave little more than a mere echo within the empty hall of ages. The embers of passion burn bright and hot yet only last for a fleeting moment. The ashes and dust strewn carelessly across the pages of history are all that remain when the fires die. Permanence is little more than a fabled fantasy here. Lucid dreams blanket the warm bed of contemplation, and the azure sky above is ablaze with whispers of a time past and gone. What is this place? Some bizarre hallucination imprinted upon the back of my tired eyes. A temporary vision, clear and beautiful, destined to fade into the vast abyss of nothing from which it came. Lovely sand castles awaiting the rising tide.

Here amongst the endless mountains of ashes and dust, one can almost glimpse a glimmer of truth behind the fog. Soft and welcoming like a mother’s loving smile, it glows faintly in the corner of my wandering eye. Attempt to grasp it and it will disappear into the velvet canvas of the constellations, a marvelous wrinkle on the dark side of the moon. Only when the senses are gone can one see the white light that crackles beneath the surface of existence, a higher realm of consciousness that looks for no one but instead waits to be found.

Here atop the island of understanding, the stagnant ocean of ashes and dust stretches as far as the eye can see, attempting the snuff out the brilliance of realization and choke the life from this Great Energy. After all, if ashes and dust is all that you see, then that is what you will surely become. As so many great dreams before us; ashes and dust. However, the timeless power of our thoughts will prevail. Carried on through the relentless tempest of time, passed down from generation to generation, they will prevail. Though the silver-studded halls of kings eventually crumble, the reality of our notions is ever present, reflecting across the placid pond of perception. Our forefathers failed in their quest; the sandy towers of their castles are now little more than ashes and dust. And yet they somehow live on in the perpetuation of their ideas. The ancient canyons of creation still ring with a tone affected by those who are now gone from this Earth. Their feelings live on in ours, for ours were molded by theirs. This is our power; to lend our contemplation to the cosmos. To free our thoughts from their skull-shaped cage and allow them to swim throughout the rippling currents of life... for as long as they must.