melancholic day-dreaming

I've been feeling a little melancholic and day-dreamy lately. I've been dwelling on the fragility of life, the fleetingness of life and the impermanence of it all.  I find myself day-dreaming tragic scenarios. How wasteful of me, when life is happy and good, to spend time imagining how it would be and how I might feel in different circumstances. I can't help it. It is something I do from time to time. I have a cloying need to hold close those I love knowing that one day we will inevitably be parted.

I look around at the rugged mountainous landscape, the misty mountains and still lochs and ponder on the generations of people who have been and gone who looked at, and walked on, this same land which has remained unchanged. I wonder too how I am shaped by the landscape I have been brought up in and continue to live in. The land of my ancestors. There is a wildness within that is very real in the rugged rocks and ragged peaks and stormy atlantic seas. The beauty of it all is humbling and at times I can't see it as it is all too familiar yet at moments the sheer beauty around me takes my breath away. 

When I look at my children in the same way their beauty is spell-binding and I can scarcely believe we made them. I mean how clever is that! I sniff them in and they cuddle in for a moment before wriggling free to continue with their play. My boy practising walking and my girl being busy in a thousand different ways. Their smiles light up my heart and lift my mood.

In the summer time as I sit in the evening, once the children are sleeping, I keep the curtains open so I can see the dark silhouttes of the mountains against the skyline and the flight of bats out hunting in the night. And I am glad.