The Unstoppable Life Force of a Living Jewel

In the wild I've been known to swim upstream. Flush with momentum, I give gas and accelerate at all costs, unable or unwilling to throttle down.

Pie-eyed, hunger upon me day and night, I feel lassoed into some higher thing that exerts an alarming pull like gravity. A great, inevitable force.

Serenity bores me. I am an animal pulsing with ennui, letting the whole ocean in at once, thirsty for newly alert nerve endings and a history that recedes into the past. A million things have happened, a million more are due.

In uncharted waters all of my cells are rising and I am going towards the source. But it is like the distance between planets.

Breaking free of my orbit to move on a separate axis is an impulse from which I may never return, though; the backward ache like a tomb where my scales turn dull.

I demonstrate my life force, but I lose my radiance. All color mutes to a drab hum, no longer a living jewel.

This is heartened by a misguided fellowship. I am following a tale, a myth, that's been passed on to inspire velocity. For the masses live in fear and believe in control.

Everyone chases dragons and I aim to become one because fear is quiet and economy of movement pure erotica. I feel reduced in my pond, too still, wondering if I am big enough to love things the way that I do, housing a keen heart overloaded with sorrow.

So I give in to the belief of authority and sway. I take on a travel odyssey of biblical proportions & follow the ultimate legend of my kind:

When the ton of us swam upstream through waterfalls and raging white waters to reach the top of a mountain - the source.

Though strength is to be gained in fighting the current, most turned back. The obstacles were too onerous, the lull of docility too strong. They glimmered in the sun as they swam together, then one muted as it swam on alone, refusing to let the flow of the river carry it away.

It fought the torrent for centuries, made great leaps through a narrow path of survival with a kind of mutiny brewing in its heart. And the gods took notice.

After a hundred years of jumping it was the only one who reached the top. The gods rewarded the perseverance and determination with fire. It became a golden dragon - the ultimate totem of power and strength.

This story is passed on to remind us we are capable of great largesse; that we blossom into majesty when doing nothing by halves.

So I allow myself to be seduced by light and fly too close to the sun. My scales redden, trepidation dissolves into effervescence - I burn. When sun-struck & attenuated to the biorhythm of such false hopes, I feel momentarily full of a saucy insolence, an exhilarating sense of trespass.

But it evaporates; the story a mirage, my wings made of wax.

Such aims are a fool's game that remains subterranean until firebombing the path forward blanches you of all radiance.

We are victims of the same conspiracy because of paradox, living among simultaneous parallel truths. We enjoy each other's company, but so much close proximity and the substrate is stirred - too much ammonia released into the water, poisoning us all.

We need each other yet we make each other sick.

So a restlessness becomes universal. A need for rebellion of the familiar stirs in our hearts. A need to escape, push upstream towards the origin - to become a dragon no longer cornered by circumstances.

When your wings have melted and you have plummeted, you come back to the same place with a new view, though. One thing becomes another.

My brilliant colors return when around others where I was made to thrive. I become a living jewel again when I am where I should be.

The gardener comes with a hose, and I hang out by the current it creates remembering my old trajectories; that grand, sweeping, urgent life - the fire it created within me. Yes, sometimes to survive you have to show some teeth. But lust only goes so far. Inertia is not the enemy we make it out to be - even water resists movement.

My core might always be my core, but I don't fancy a lot of fuss these days. I'm not lulled into docility. I am not languishing. I am in full command of my powers.

I'm a sturdy creature with delicate sensibilities and warring desires, a study in contrasts. But I am no longer a creature at odds with itself. I have accepted I will always contain two contrary states at once: the dragon and the jewel.

I am a thing of more vivid beauty when still.

In that stillness I am full of the power of grace & surrender rather than the force of fire that stems from fear.

And it's such an exotic display, this miraculous lustre of eagerness for peace. Like the detail of an otherwise elusive dream.

I am a dragon

but only when gentle

sure & buoyant

ablaze like a beacon,

nothing to get.