One day in September, 40 years of the companionship of a forest brings a hermit to the culmination of his life cycle.
Somewhere between waking and sleeping on our journey towards the unfathomable deep, there comes a thin moment where we have one foot in the waking world and the other is in that other world where we relinquish conscious control.
Pausing here and straddled between two planets that drive one another like gears, the attentive traveler will notice a narrow door only wide enough to sidle through.
This is the border of sleep, where imagination and reality are braided together, a chasm in the crust of consciousness, venting the hot pumice of imagery into the irresistible magma of narrative.
Welcome to episode 45 of Stories from the Borders of Sleep, a fortnightly podcast of curious tales from from bordersofsleep.com featuring original stories by your host, Seymour Jacklin.
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The beautiful soundtrack for this week's episode is by chora player David Gildan from his album Gato the Lion.
It's gorgeous and it's available from magnitude.com so if you are ready to journey with me, then I shall begin Brother Savion by Seymour Jacklin Any artist will tell you it's difficult to make an interesting picture when the subject is predominantly brown.
Yet nature mixes brown upon her palette for her most generous moments, from the doe's flank to the nurturing loam and nourishing SAP, and even to the fine liquid in the tiny bottle that Brother Savion was holding up to the light.
He shook the bottle gently and splashed a little of the liquid up the glass inside.
It fell into viscous golden pillars and streamed back to its source.
That was good.
No sediment.
The preparation was ready.
The bottle contained the distillation of late summer hedgerows, when nature pressed out the fruit of the year in a great and generous sacrifice of energy.
He was fixed with a sudden urge to uncork the bottle and inhale deeply the essence of rosehip and bitter blackthorn berries, linden flower and hazel bark.
But he must wait for that.
If this were to last the winter, he would need it when the hard clench of frost came to defy the thin rays of midwinter sun and kept the ground hard all day, right through to the late snows that would come to hide the first motions of spring under its weight.