niar #1

Stand in the wild grass and watch as a projection of early summer flickers upon low rolling hills. Scattered amongst lichen covered ruins are purple weeds in flower, their colors thinned by a high noon sun. There’s a choir of birds singing faintly from the limbs of a distant canopy, above them sparse clouds hang in a windless sky. Steeped in the light of this projection, your skin shifts into symmetry with the vacant air which surrounds it and so the air and the skin become numb to one another. With no edge of difference to brush against, an idle weightlessness takes hold.

The light begins to hush from the edges of the sky and slouch into a horizon that is obscured by the softly chiming canopy. With this movement of light, you watch as the dusty shades of fauna, soil, and stone deepen in shadow and color, they appear cleaner in this changing light, and now the birds have stopped singing. Quietude spreads over the landscape like a deeply held breath.

(it begins to rain)

Faint sounds of tapping break the pregnant silence, sparse, distant, and growing closer, uncountable, lapping the hills like a shallow wave while growing into a static hiss, acting upon everything which lives and everything that does not. Leaf and limb begin to sway and shake, a wave passes through the grasses as they bow to the touch of some unknown phantom. And soon the wave moves over you, your skin draped in a sheet of cool rain, clarity. Breathe through the nose and realize the air has become steeped in memories. Iron, petal, soil, grass, moss, death, dreams, divinity— All is rung ceaselessly by downpour, the world’s echo humming within infant ears.

(everything has a sound)

Your perception is swallowed by the rising crescendo of forms vibrating to the sky’s lament. There is no need for vision to walk forward. Every footstep births a sillage of life and decay to rise out of the soil and permeate the air like a perfume. Breathe nature’s umber colors and cascade amongst the living and mineral traces of the land, become washed into the soil as these rhythmic taps drum in syncopation with ten thousand lungs breathing. Dissolve within this kinetic stir of color and form, into the projection you merely watched as a flicker before—perhaps the rain’s intent is this: to erode that which stands in its path, to wash everything into a greater unity.

a. vos