Wildfire

The chaff burns, a smoky cloak of ash billowing to the east as the wind picks up. The prairies are still as night falls, waiting for the rain. Bison paw at the cooled soil, waiting for buds to push through. Nature has tilled and fertilized without breaking ground.

Turning a page in a notebook has the same effect. A new start. Unburdened by words or previous ideas. A sentence flowing as a fresh rain, no riverbed to guide its path.

The problem with opportunities is that they need to be planted and take root. A seed has to develop its own weight and shape. Previous words needs to anchor future ones. There is nothing as withering as the gaze of the future looking back on the mistakes of the past– other branches that should have been taken, and other seeds that should have been sown.

And so the grasslands are burned. The page is turned. The nib digs a hole and plants a new idea in the soil of the mind.

But far in the distance trees sway in the breeze. The protected ground of the undergrowth cool beneath the August sun. Ideas that are safe under the canopy knot themselves into stories.

The trees themselves woodn't wouldn't have known what their bodies would become. Tools made from their felled frames, houses from their planed corpses. Unimaginable usefulness and reach from the seeds that were left to grow. But they needed to be left.

I've razed enough prairie acres, turned single notebook pages to ash. Restarted a blog and homepage on all of the platforms. Left nothing to grow.

The green heads poking through the ground are beautiful, but it is easy to get trapped in an eternal spring. It's time to let some trees grow, for multiple seasons to pass.

It's time to sit in the shade of my own forest.