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A Spiritually Enlightening Online Magazine. May's Theme: "Cycles"
Volume 8 Issue 4 ISSN# 1708-3265



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 		Simply Pondering…
by Alegria Imperial

Purring… the only sound between us, as if it is unusual, marks the way evening falls ever so quietly in our lives in the winter. The cold bars us in, our thoughts seemingly unto each own. "Winter," I once said, drawing a deep long sigh, "asks of us a wearying task of digging into our burrows alone and not together." He had quipped, "Like squirrels and hares and bears, right?"

He makes light of the dark. That's him, my friend and lover. I see beyond everything and make too much of it, as he describes my thought patterns. As if I hardly change, as if the seasons pass me by and like a portrait on stone—my pose in reverie engraved the way I must look right now, looking out to the soft snow glowing on its own light as it falls. No sound except Kat-kat sleeping, purring its dreams.

"Don't worry," he breaks the silence. "In a few weeks, the bare trees will sprout," he says without looking at me from the book he's reading. "I know," I murmur. "I know. The cold winds will curl up and roll into the depths of seas. Heat will seep off the waters and the dark frozen earth, breathing life back to whatever withered and died in the cleansing whiteness of snow. I'm not worried or sad, if that's what you think," I retort delayed. "I'm simply pondering."

And I continue. "A clump of snowdrops by the gate will spawn again shy as virgin girls who would never look up to their lovers' eyes. In a while, crocuses will raise their buds like pursed lips, waiting for a kiss. Not filigreed lawns but front gardens dotted with Queen Anne's lace will soon unfurl. This morning, I glimpsed pregnant knuckles of hydrangea twigs, though the cherry trees in the winter sun remain starkly bare, and flapping among winter debris, the nuthatch, an early migrant bird. Spring, a brief and giddying season, I know, always seems to burst and spangle the skies with cherry blossoms, white plums and magnolias as if overnight. Raw Food and Fasting Coaching with Aleesha Stephenson

But for summer, I always await like a teen-ager. I love how the sun bleaches sea, earth and sky and lets me bare my limbs. I love how trees thickly greening blossom like those of the hundred-year old chestnuts close by, and turn into an apparition at dusk, mantled in a sheer lace of tiny white blossoms. Lush vines and shrubs lining walks in the woods breathe out the thin, smoky substance that, when we inhale, draws us to hold hands or stop briefly to embrace as if exhilarated from a love potion.

"Are we going back to Bowen Island this year?" I ask, emboldened by the memory of our walk in the woods by the lake last year. "Hmmm," he seems to purr. I take it as yes and no, both ways. He hardly lets his mind wander. He takes life as it comes. As he always tells me, he rides through the cycles of life. We got married in the summer, which should make it my most treasured season. We marked it this year with a vow to love as we should, which we quietly said in that tiny chapel in the island. But we met in the autumn that to me is the most glorious cycle in our lives.

That first autumn of my life, I thought gold was the true colour of people's eyes like mine that gazed for hours at maple leaves, even while walking. That was when I bumped him under a bower in a Boston square while traveling. My cousins had left me alone in my daze to get coffee and pastries. He was rushing out to catch the time left where he parked his car. I fell and bruised my right cheek. He cradled me like he had loved me all his life. A wind swooped the square and scraps of gold fluttered and lit on his hair, his shoulders to my face—a magical moment.

Fifteen years… fifteen seasons… but that autumn in my mind relives itself on the first leaf that turns. His hair has more silver strands this year. Mine has lost more volume. His leanness has thickened even with his tall shadows. My clothes trap the puff in my midriff tighter. We had not skied this year. He did not uproot the shrubs to replace them this spring. I left the rose on the patio to die in the freeze, forgetting about it when I had bouts of fever and infections, signs of my body weakening in its defenses. But in between, our laughter over my first attempt last summer to bake meringue that flattened once air touched it outside of the oven; my tears and his soft shushing when the canary one morning in the spring just lay on his side, his feet curled. We stayed in, cocooned, reading and rehashing our stories during long weekend breakfasts this winter, about the cycles we know by heart that never find us the same yet the same in the right places.


A seeker of truth and peace after tangled pathways, I have also found a voice in my search. A retired journalist, I have since focused on poetry and fiction. I launched my first book in Manila before migrating to Vancouver last year and recently received two honourable mentions for poetry.

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