The Flight of the Firefly
Notes from the Forest's Edge
Notes from the Forest’s Edge is a bi-monthly delve into the liminal spaces between the seen and the unseen, nature and human, conscious and subconscious. Along with the podcast, Celtic Medicine Stories, these notes are part of the reader supported publication Adventures in the Otherworld.
The blinking of the lightening bugs encourages my sleepy eyes to stay awake a little longer. I'm up with the birds most days so making it to dark is a struggle at this time of year when the sun stretches on for ever. But those sweet, incandescent, flying ones keep enchanting me through dusk.
There's some imperceptible threshold between day and night that, when crossed, signals to them that it is time. Somewhere in the soft grey, between the times, they turn on their golden glow. The few that start showing themselves seem to embolden the rest until an entire kingdom is alight.
As the velvet of the summer night thickens around them they carry the warm light of the sun through the edge of the forest. Tiny candles inviting me into the Otherworld. The stars start to burn silver as the moon wheels her way across the night.
From my nest in the grass I see floating layers of gold and silver, swirling, magician's hands moving the threads of reality around as if to deliberately confuse. My consciousness, unable to maintain a straight line of thought amidst the dancing molecules of light, expands into the vast space of the sky. The gentle sound of the leaves, the trickling creek and the warm air on my skin, lull me further out into the beyond.
The mind images that herald sleep start to flow, mixing with the swirl of silver and gold. My inner world beginning to blend, again, with the out there world. To stay here takes some effort, sleep is beckoning me, calling me to her honeyed depths. I'm pushing back so I can savor the sweetness of this world for just one more moment.
I wonder about death.
Might this be how it goes? To be torn between two beauties, the hold of the physical slowly fraying, releasing me into this soft, nebulous, glow.
Maybe.
I hope so.
It's not time yet, it is simply sleep that calls now. I know if i let her take me I'll wake up later wet with dew and covered in crawling ones. So I heave the heaviness of my material being up out of the grass to head for the house.
But my consciousness still fills the sky as my feet tread the grass. I'm aware of myself as this unique blend of the One Mind in the All That Is, consciousness cavorting with matter for a while, teetering on the narrow strip of the edge of each until I fall into the ocean.
How do you imagine your own death dear one?