Michael Scott Hand

Author Archives: Michael

• 20092021

  Posted at 9:10 am by Michael, on September 20, 2021

  The tide raises us like boats and we are held up by the surface of the water, buoyed up beneath the majesty of the night sky and all its lights.

  There, the boats are above everything and the moonlight shimmers on their sails. And the water shows the reflection of the endless darkness and turns it to light that sweeps and shimmers across the waves.

  And the moon and the stars loom so large and so close and the waves roll away to the star-lit horizon such that we might imagine that we could ride them away into the sky.

  This is the ocean and the night and the tide that raises us. This is the moon and the stars that light our way. This is the swelling of the ocean before it ebbs away.

  Sunlight dawns on weary sails, no longer shining in the moonlight. Boats shift and rock upon the morning water, no longer raised up against the sky.

  A gull caws and a rope is thrown. A mop slides across the deck. An anchor is hauled and the wind whips through the sails, filling them with hope.

  The sky is blue and filled with wispy clouds that drift like fleeting memories. The captain stands at the bow and watches the sun rise.

  The sunlight spreads across the water.

  Posted in Mondays | 0 Comments

• 13092021

  Posted at 7:33 am by Michael, on September 13, 2021

  I… sometimes struggle to find the words, to describe the struggle that resides within me. I push back with my psyche against the darkness and a light radiates from somewhere within that is not like any other light.

  And in the light we see the cracks and scars that mark us (scars both literal and more ambiguous), we see the lines of worry around our eyes; lines that mark our love.

  For if you have loved you have worried and if you have been afraid than you have hoped. And so that light that shines and betrays us to the world as broken, rebuilt, worried, afraid, hopeful also shows us to be beautiful.

  Far more precious than ancient antiques, paint flaked and faded, chipped porcelain; we are living, breathing legacies of everything and everyone we’ve loved and our humanity, our fragility, those same feelings that make us ache are those same feelings that make us alive.

  So bear your scars with pride and lift your chin. You do not need to hide the lines around your eyes or the pain within them. Embrace the wholeness of that which makes you feel weak, for that which we mistake as weakness is merely bravery and weariness. And accept that you can be–in fact, that you are–both broken and beautiful.

  Posted in Mondays | 0 Comments

• These Hills

  Posted at 9:49 am by Michael, on September 12, 2021

  these hills are a place

  where it is always night

  not the mean blackness

  some knights possess

  but a diffuse sort of darkness

  lit by the distant pin-pricks

  of exploding gas

  and the moon

  catching the light

  from an unseen sun

  and dripping it like honey

  such that these hills

  and this ever-night

  is lit by milky amber

  hues that carry the promise

  of magic

  Posted in Poems | 0 Comments

• Volcano Man

  Posted at 4:26 pm by Michael, on September 10, 2021

  

  Posted in Drawings | 0 Comments

• 06092021

  Posted at 9:05 am by Michael, on September 6, 2021

  The thread passes through the head of the needle and then the needle passes through the weave of the thread; this is what it is to sew.

  The tiller is dragged through the soil and then the seeds are scattered across the field; this is what it is to sow.

  The writer threads words into sentences and plants the seeds of ideas–and so, both sews and sows.

  Posted in Mondays | 0 Comments

• Blue Skies

  Posted at 9:00 am by Michael, on September 1, 2021

  The weather is full of unfulfilled promises.

  Would that bad things only happened when the weather is stark and grey and dreary. Would that every heartbreak be acknowledged by the sudden downpouring of rain. Would that every agony of mankind be reflected by the weather, such that the sky became forever turgid with the endless suffering of humanity.

  Nothing is as depressing to me as a sunny day and a blue sky.

  We are supposed to relish the sunlight. When flowers bloom and seedlings pop their ignorant heads above the soil. Sunny days are here again, they say, and people drink and dance. This is the world—so warm and shining and brilliant. This is happiness: a child sitting with a melting ice-cream in a cone, a dog cheerfully bounding across a sea of grass with a stick in its mouth.

  But tragedy is not afraid of the sun, or the flowers, or the misbegotten optimism of the sun-worshippers in their temples. Tragedy occurs no matter the weather.

  The weather is unflinching. It does not care. The bumblebee picks at the heart of a flower, gathering pollen. A child sits, crying, with a melting ice-cream in a cone; a stick remains in the grass because there is no dog to fetch it.

  These are the unspoken agonies of every sunny day. This is a funeral procession without dark clouds to accompany it. This is the horrible, horrendous blue sky.

  For me, that vast blue nothing does not conjure hope, or calm, or peace. Rather it is a vast, unbounded horror. And the sun on the leaves. And the sun on the cement. And the smells in the air.

  Ah, such beautiful tapestry does the sun weave. And yet the soldiers still march. Bombs still explode. And in a room somewhere that the light does not reach a hand touches another hand—leathery now, close to death now, and another life slips away.

  And it is sunny outside. And people are cheerful and rambunctious. And they raise toasts to the idiot glorification of a sun that persists even when it is cloudy, an ever-explosion of nuclear light in the sky that blinds our eyes and brands our skin.

  I hate it. Let the sky pour with the rain of our tears. Let the heavens lament all that we have lost. Let the ground rumble with the articulation of our collective rage.

  In the cold and the wet and the grey.

  In the pounding of the rain and the cold bite of the wind.

  There, I find solace.

  Posted in Personal, Philosophy | 0 Comments

• 30082021

  Posted at 9:09 am by Michael, on August 30, 2021

  The man stands before the mountain that mocked the boy.

  The mountain has not changed–but the boy has.

  There’s grey in his hair now; like the cold, far-off glinting of stars.

  There is a certain weariness about the way he stands.

  There is a certain determination in his dark eyes.

  The boy once stood in this imaginary place.

  This no-place except a place to see a mountain.

  And the mountain mocked the boy. And the mountain said:

  “Can you climb the mountain?”

  As though a mountain could talk.

  In the years that have passed the boy/man has not moved an inch.

  He stands in the same spot, he looks at the same mountain.

  But it is different now: the mountain no longer mocks him.

  In his youth the mountain brought him here.

  Now the man brings the mountain to him.

  The mountain is imaginary–he does not need to climb it.

  If he wishes, he may make himself taller than the mountain and merely step over it.

  And so the mountain does not ask:

  “Can you climb the mountain?”

  The boy has outgrown the question.

  Posted in Mondays | 0 Comments

• You’ve Been Here

  Posted at 10:02 am by Michael, on August 27, 2021

  

  You’ve Been Here (2021)

  Is it a place, or is it a feeling? The gentle breeze, the swaying of the grass, the open expanse of cloud-laden sky.

  Posted in Photographs | 0 Comments

• A New Chapter

  Posted at 9:40 am by Michael, on August 24, 2021

  Chapter 1 of The Interloper is now available.

  Some other things have been shuffled around a bit as I attempt to achieve coherence.

  A new category of posts will appear soon, labelled Lore.

  Posted in Housekeeping | 0 Comments

• 23082021

  Posted at 9:02 am by Michael, on August 23, 2021

  I do not try to catch my ideas, or else I find they slip through my fingers.

  Like running water–like a wild stream–coursing downwards between the rocks. Churning and turning, leaves bob and tumble along the foaming surface and sand swirls beneath them.

  These are my ideas: this wild stream, this ever-coursing. The movement of the water is chaotic, we cannot predict where each particle ends up and as the stream weaves back and forth between the rocks and the shore, as it bounces and bubbles and foams, it splits up and reforms, splits up and reforms, splits up and reforms.

  One thousand times a second. Who knows, maybe more. The water mingles and mixes and so do my ideas run across and through one another, both the same ideas–the same stream–and different, ever-changing and ever-changed by their passage through this analogy.

  Analogy, no less an allegory, no less a speaking of things hidden from view yet visible to the watcher of the stream who perceives his thoughts rushing downwards, ever-changing, ever-chaotic. And the He that is Me knows it is impossible to collect these ideas, even in a bucket.

  For the water outside of the stream is nothing like the water within. The water outside is stagnant and separate. It contains, perhaps, a hint of the source, but nothing like the memory of being one with the stream. And so the idea, like the water, must be poured back.

  I do not try to catch my ideas, I merely watch them and am aware of them and am aware of the sensation of gravity and momentum that propels them and me forward, down, weaving complex patterns between the rocks. I do not try to catch my ideas and pour them into glasses and say: look what I have imagined, taste the water of my dreams.

  I merely watch the stream and am aware of it and, in turn, from that swirling, ever-downwards chaos, describe the thought-forms I see reflected on the surface. Is that the sun that shines through the trees or the illumination of my intellect?

  There is no such thing as still water.

  Posted in Mondays | 0 Comments

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