The Boar of Winter

I feel restless, pacing the edge of the creek. Looking, watching, squinting my eyes, often unsure of what I see. There is an unsettledness in the air, hanging beneath the redwoods, hovering above the ferns amidst the ivy.

Less than 3 days before the full moon, the turn of the seasons beginning to groan like an ancient wood pivot supporting the weight of the Earth. It is twilight, and yet it is not dusk, and an eerie thread of cloud gauzes over the sky. It is cold, but dry, though the ground is wet still from an earlier rain and last night’s late autumn air.

And everything is so quiet, and still, though there is a breeze coming down the ravine from the direction of the sea. In all ways it is both this and that, and it leaves me unsettled as well.

Will I meet a madman or madwoman running towards me, eyes ablaze with ecstatic frenzy? Will this person cry out the approach of season’s change, the weight of the unforgiving, the dominion of Winter’s fierce onslaught already stirring among the fallen autumn leaves. Am I ready?

It makes no difference: the inevitable shifting of the earth upon its axis will continue to lend a deep groan from the soil, between the rocks. And the ivy hears, sits quiet, and waits. Silent, with many ears, laying close to the Earth and clutching tightly the rough bark of trees.

I sense it in my chest, high in my abdomen. A tight pang, a feeling like a relentless edge of a thin blade slid beneath my ribcage. It thrusts me to high alertness, watchful, combing the wooded banks with my eyes for a clue, perhaps messaged by the sword ferns browned from the relentless pounding of the last storm. Not there, I look for an answer from the creek, and I am hypnotized by an unusually round and black rock glistening beneath the dancing water in the last of this hazy daylight.

And still I find nothing, that is nothing more than my awareness. I am aware that the boar of Winter is bearing down on us, eyes bulging and frothing with the momentum of an entire planet. There is no way to stop it. All we can do is all that any era of humankind can do… so I grasp my shield in one hand, and my spear in another, and raise my voice to the sky and shout.