I'd better hurry up and finish this house!

I have to hurry up and finish this house. It's relevant moment is slipping away.

Good fairy houses tell a story. They inspire me to look past the easy understanding of where the door is and how the whimsical the roof is and to look into the rhythm of the house, hoping to find something a little deeper and linked inexplicably to the universe.  

Mind candy to chew on as we pass by.

Lately I've been drawn to shattered trees. Lots of trees nearby have lost their battle with wind and electricity this winter. When they lose they make lots of noisy mess. They crack and fall to the forest floor in jagged ripped up pieces. Their hearts are exposed, a dark center that fades towards the edges. There's no pretending everything's OK. It's decidedly not. 

 And there's beauty in this jagged rawness of unrehearsed truth.

The part I like in this tree is the fiber edges. They're so unlike the big solid tree they came from. Wispy and incomplete, the tough fibers peel back almost playfully from the wood. They are as thin as thread sometimes.  They are open to interpretation. 

I picked up an armful and brought them back to the shop where I splayed them out to dry. 

Then I've sort of assembled them into the foundation for a house. Now I'm teasing 'what's next' out of what's here...is this too many sticks? I think it is too filled in. I'll take some out.

There's a surprise inside the house. A heart severely tested. It's bark from my friend's tree which though still alive has been struck by lightning - twice. Part of it is charred black and, since it lives, was coated with pitch in the summer. When it was struck again this fused into an ebony of sorts. It's beautiful too, changed like us by power beyond its control.

There's a ways to go on this house.  I need to finish it soon though because spring is starting to peek around the edges here.  The usual Circle of Life.  As days get longer I'm less enamored with the surviving bits from brutal storms and more interested in the thrum of returning life energy and returning bits of green.