Michael Rastovich

My hope is that my blossom, but a bud, lies still yet in my heart ready to unfold if ever that golden light might fall upon it.

My fear is that the very last feather has been plucked and these wings will never know the sky.

One by one they walked away and slowly it was emptied of all it’s purpose and all it’s memories. It was once but is no more. Only the healing scars from the scratches of those who lived there remain as if to say, we now return to our regular programming already in progress.

It is in these places that I am comforted it whispers to me – No one is here now, they shall not return. In this place you are safe.

It is not only ghost towns. All abandoned and peopleless places call to me. A corner of a garden in full view with the thinness of winter now obscured and forgotten in  the fullness of summer is for a season at least, – abandoned.

A usually busy street but as luck would have it, everyone is away on holiday. A schoolroom with no school today. No students crowding or teachers crabbing. The Hall before or after the dance. Empty. Abandoned. Vacant.

In a church in mid week between the next sermon and the last, I can glory in the empty that is all. For me that curtain closes once people take their seats.

It seems to me that in the company of others there is a rush to madness. All primping posing and politeness. My authenticity is strangled so that the group can breath. Each such experience leaves me dull and dismembered. After a lifetime of such encounters I am left with a bag of parts and i have forgotten how it all goes together.

So I am off in search of ghost towns and forsaken places to feel the shape of empty spaces and be alone to become all one.

It rings a chord in me to see the awkward the foolish the less than normal stand before their judges and endure the slights and jokes at their expense, then perform to reveal that they are not any of the things they were thought to be or perhaps in spite of them, they turn out to be and always were, extraordinary.

How many things how many others do we harshly judge or cast aside without ever hearing the song they sing.

It is not that moment of enlightenment and shame of the scornful. It is the moment when the light of the scorned has at last been seen. The song of the slighted is finally heard, and it is extraordinary.

Freewill is the branches

that grow as they please

Fate is the tree

that was always a tree.

The way we are going is nice enough but must we go so fast.

Could we go slow or stop a bit, and sit along the way.

It all seems to lose a little luster as we go speeding past.

Sometimes, in the garden of life, one should dead head the memories that have lost their bloom.

Everyone’s burning question is answered when at the begining of a disaster some fool leaps up and screams…

“We’re all going to die!

The meaning of life is everything that happens between now and the day you die.

The meaning of life is life it’s self, and …

“We’re all going to die!”

I once was young and stupid.

I am older now, but have retained my youthful stupid.

There is a place that I go whenever I paint. Within this place I am complete, fulfilled and at peace. Even as I am wrangling paint. Even as I struggle to understand what needs to be done there is an effortlessness because whatever I do, does not do much and if I do wrong, I am forgiven.

This place which I go I have put down roots there and can return there whenever I remember who I am.

As I see myself, God sees me also and we sit together for a while and admire our work.

The melting snow

will rinse away

the collected salts

of winter fallen tears

from roots, deep darkest

now thirsting for the spring.