Fireflies in the dark

My front yard at night

The pain of life is aggravated by a flicker of beauty here, a glimmer of love there, and an occasional touch of compassion here and there. If love went invariably unrequited, if filth was all that one could see around, and if insensitivity was the universal rule, we would learn not to expect anything better.

Every flower that blooms in my little garden gives me the impetus to keep fighting the weeds. The weeds are vindictive. They keep smothering the flower plants incessantly. It is far more facile to buy flower pots from the nursery and line them up on my drive walls. But those flowers don’t smile as do the ones that I nurture personally.  

The struggles of the little saplings against the mighty weeds remind me of the terrors that life throws along the way. If there were only terrors and their disgrace, however, heaven and hell would have been redundant notions. Where there is only agony, there can be no concept of bliss. But life loves to poke fun at us with the little trickles of honey offered as we hang from the wizened branch hoping to save ourselves from the snarling tiger beneath.

The sculptor goes on sweating blood at the monstrous mass of granite in order to carve graceful beauty out of it. Is the granite heaven? Or is it hell?

I was standing outside home in the diaphanous shimmer of the distant moon when came flying a dot of light. The firefly alighted on my shoulder. It whispered something in my ear. The darkness is my reality, it said. My light is my existence.