Glower Flower
The shape in which we see our lives is constantly being admired from a different angle each day. Each day is an overstatement, with each decision. They say that old habits die hard, and recognizing the state to which those habits have you now is like looking over a lifelong cliff and trying to catch yourself on the last ridge (habit) you managed to create.
On each ledge, there is a symbol of your life at the time which solidified who you were from then on until the next grasp at the wall. We have our backpacks filled with personal mementos, a water bottle for hygienic replenishment, and the sun beating down on our backs, urging our survival towards the cool night.
While some scale the mountain without a breath in the wrong direction, I keep my food down in search for the unexpected greenery among rock that seems to only be made of jagged lessons.
Cuts, scrapes, hard impact, broken bones, bites, and impalement have found their right of passage in the hurt that comes with trying and trying again. Fixing what is broken and beaten down will take time no matter how you position your stance; it has to feel right, stable. That looks different for everyone, which is why we all take up our own corners of the world, completing one stretch of mountainous lessons so that the next hike leaves you less short of breath; it is easier that way to enjoy the scenery.
We have rescue teams in place for the spectrum that yields from cynical over-achievers to skeptical depressives, both who have fear, debilitating and engaging, in common. Falling can feel like discovering gravity, innate in the state of day-to-day mistake-making, or life. How else will we accurately scale our own mountains and place our pitons in the hope that the rope will string us along?
I am trying to create my own bouquet of glowering flowers which have spawned by the rain I ensue when having pondered digging my own tunnel and hiding within a cramped cave. But I know my bones would ache for movement, my skin would turn cold without the bright sun, and my eyes would eventually close from the mountain's own tears it stuffs down into its core to drip onto cave dwellers like me.
My flowers have felt both replenishment and destruction at the hands of climbers susceptible to conflicts of interest, leaving a glowering glow-like stain that is mentioned in survival books as “hard to swallow.” After depending on harshness for survival, they bloom with every greeting or growl, expelling nothing but light come every dark night.
