Dragging Stones Toward The Sun

The songs of ancient spirits chanting through us all

Jul 19, 2024

There is a mighty wind that blows a dust storm through us all, carrying tiny particles for centuries, for millennia, for eons. I feel that eternal wind as I see in my daughter’s face a certain glint that peers at me from my mother’s eye in a fleeting glimpse through time. The chain of generations, all cut from the same paper, holding hands and swinging in that breeze. I see my father too, in my daughter, as she reaches for her tea, lost in thought, her fingers like tendrils searching gently through the air.

I hear my father in the timbre of my laugh and feel him in my casual slouch as I gaze across the table at my daughter’s delicate fingers taking the teacup handle oh so slowly and pulling tea toward her lips that utter things she could never have heard, blowing through our family’s lives into my daughters, for whom my heart is bursting, for whom my love is forever brimming, for whom I would without hesitation pull stars from the heavens.

We are forever sculpted through every word and every gesture, with every truth and every lie, in every daily drudgery, in every mundane place, in kitchens and shopping centres and bedrooms and back seats, where tongues should have been bitten, and words should be have been swallowed, where praise should be given or an eye held gently for but a moment longer, for every tiny gesture, every perpetual forgiveness, every casual cruelty is planted like a hardy seed, never drowned by time but instead growing stronger, waiting to blossom in the fertile generations to come.

I wanted to be a better man than I am. I wanted to be a barrier, a mighty dam in the mountains of time. I wanted to hold back all those waters in which I nearly drowned. I have striven to be a reservoir for all that has been poured into my valleys, so that my daughters will not get drenched. I’ve wanted to protect those delicate fingers gripping that bone china cup, from the storms and torrents of my past that inevitably flow toward them, through them, over them, so that they might be free from that which I have suffered, so that they might be somehow saved.

But I know this is but a deceptive sermon, for it preaches one thing and does another. There is always a torrent of tiny gestures that reveal the truth. It’s a fools errand to suggest the past should be hidden and swallowed and the weight of the world is yours to be carried alone, because this conceit will merely become the source of a new river of whispers that will flow over them. So instead I collapsed my dam and let the waters flood from me so they could see me for who I am, even if that is but a mystery, especially to me, especially to me.

I know and so do you, that all this is easily written, easily said, as if it were a mere thing, freely passed from hand to hand, as if it were a simple choice to parade ones vulnerabilities and flaws alongside and with equal billing to ones kindness and forgiving, as if it were a mere trifle to let oneself be seen, truly seen, even by oneself, risking everything in the hope that lightness will outweigh all that other, of which there is no guarantee, oh no, there is no guarantee.

I see my father’s hands as I reach for my tea cup to raise toward my lips that have spoken so many words when they should have stayed quiet and stayed quiet when they should have spoken.

My daughter places her cup back on the table and sighs deeply and I want to ask her why, but I know to wait, when once the beans would have been spilled at the merest nudge. But this old kingdom has been reformed. There was no special announcement, no coronation, just a relatively silent transition, that seemed to happen in a trice, where the hand that once clasped my own loosened its grip and even though I tried to tighten mine it was gone, reaching for teacups, and then glasses of wine, all on its own, so that without even the merest consultation it was suddenly me that had to learn to let go as another domino begins to fall.

We are all dominoes standing in a row. There are but four dominoes from my great grandmother to my daughter, an insignificant little number, just a tic tic tic tic as they fall, passing a tiny packet of energy and momentum, a spirit surfing along our family chain.

What of 100 dominoes standing in a row? Each a mother to a child, generations birthing new generations, 100 dominoes, no more, would span back some 3000 years. 100 dominoes reaches back to the end of the Bronze Age. 100 dominoes, no more, 100 whispers as they fall.

Take 600 dominoes in a row and we’re knocking stone on stone. The glint in my daughter’s eye has been travelling through this family chain since those stones were raised on Salisbury Plain. Did those ancient hands also reach out with fingers like tendrils through time, holding tightly to our traits, as those stones were dragged from Wales down onto Salisbury Plain? Were those ancient lips as quick to laugh, only 600 dominoes away, as my daughter and I, formed by the little storm of dust that’s blown on the wind from way back when we dragged great stones toward the sun to this table now so lightly laden with our bonechina cups of tea?

What talk then of each of us an individual with free will, if those ancient ancestors with their glinting eyes are forever there peering from within us? Did they too think their hands were like their father’s as they held flint knives and sliced roasted aurochs flesh or baked flat breads to share in the summer solstice as they reach through time with fingers like tendrils and grip these very days?

But what of us this very day

dragging along our stones?

What do those ancient spirits say

To all our sun bleached bones?

“Rave on, you fools of certainty

with rules of fate, not true

Rave on tills this eternity

Claims they and us and you

Rave on with hearts a’pounding

Tear down those feeble walls

And kiss those faces beaming

Pay heed those heathen calls