Alabaster and indigo, or is it, … “or” indigo.  Negative entropy blues, anyway.

It’s said, albeit in an all too unreliable source, that “for everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven”.  Perhaps there’s a bit of truth there.  Perhaps not.

It’s approaching the Ides of December in an odd-numbered year, a year preceding one in which February will be a day longer.  An illusion of course, as are all months in a solar year.  But, at any rate, it’s at least a metaphorical season, a season for memories as another galactic solstice approaches.

A season for melancholy and nostalgia, for yule logs and the revels of Saturnalia and little drummer boys not yet blasted to shreds; a season for wistful bagpipes and for sanguine guitars, Arabic music melding with Keltic.  A season for reflecting on the pasts we’ve lived and on those we might have lived, for good or ill.  A season for introspection and for reflection on feelings of love we’ve shared and for speculation on loves we should have shared but let slip away, and perhaps, for regretting some that might best have been avoided. 

A season, perhaps, for discarding enmities and hatreds, although that’s all too often much too hard to do.  A season for remembering friends who’ve passed beyond the veil and for regretting the time not found to spend with them.  Perhaps a season for wondering whether there’s a state of unity that might make everything worthwhile (if, in fact, “for everything there [really] is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven”) or, a season for lamenting that the purported prince of Peace was an illusion.

Introspective reflection is as dangerous as it is beneficent.  Perhaps more so.

Reflections are all too often more bitter than sweet.  So many regrets, so many mistakes, so many paths not taken.  So many twists and turns into obscure shadows, flashing echoes drawing us further and further into a dark abyss where terror dwells as others, thundering, warn us away.  Cherished memories more and more quickly fading; more and more tarnished with each passing day as things in which we once took pride turn out to all too often have been mere delusions.

Here and there, barely noticed and all too often ignored, unexpected rainbows play with fireflies and tiny birds buzz in place sipping sweet nectar from flowers blooming in myriad tones and hues.  Clouds form shifting tapestries on azure fields above swirling waves of peaks changing from greens to greys then from blues to purples and, every once in a while, tipped with gleaming cones of winter’s bright white; peaks interspersed with golden fields and silvered river valleys, all doing their best to ignore intrusive asphalt roads and cement cities.  Transient monuments to imagined triumphs slowly but surely returning to the dust from whence, like us, they came.

The Ides of December are upon us, … again.  Then the solstice will arrive, winter in half the globe, summer in the rest.  Cycles continue.  Divergent rites of passage form myriad wakes woven into strange tapestries by disinterested fates, one a crone, another a mother and the third barely a lass.  All the while, Alekto, Megaera and Tisiphone, the Eumenides, curious but patient, continue to watch, certain that all things, good or ill, will come to those who wait.

Or so, the ubiquitous “they”, say.

Alabaster and indigo, or is it, … “or” indigo.  Negative entropy blues, … anyway.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.