The Foolish at Night
The foolish-hearted people exist in this world more than we really know.
The foolish-hearted people do foolish-hearted things because their heart has its own language and sense of life that others do not understand.
The foolish-hearted person feeds a stray raccoon when the skies are smeared with smoke and the night feels mean-spirited to the wild things because they know things that others do not know. But it is not a judgment call at all that others do not know. It is simply a fatalistic recognition of a nature that had no choice.
The foolish-hearted person, two weeks later, is feeding 14 raccoons and a skunk.
And the critters in their quest scratch and scrabble at the window and growl with each other outside the door like demons in the dark and yet the foolish-hearted person carries on. Because the foolish-hearted person knows it is simply in the nature of some wild things to spit and squeal and snarl and when daybreak finally spills into morning, the screaming banshees will be gone.
But the foolish-hearted always stop and asks themselves, in discovery at the light of the day when the pots and the wood and the debris of the deck have been tossed and thrown about in the night, “What the fuck am I doing?” That’s what the foolish-hearted people always ask themselves. In the light of day.
But then the night comes again, and the moon-cloaked scavengers scamper to the food as if it was their only reason to be on the earth at all. For the feeding from the foolish-hearted. And there will always be the one elected, who with sad black eyes and scrubby ears will reach his soft grey hands to yours and catch your soul again as if his gesture is a gratitude, a recognition, an I-thou and not a curiosity. Is it perhaps a prayer?
The foolish-hearted makes magic of supposition in the night but wonders about rabies in the morning. Yet such practicality of thought has no place when the scratches at the window begin. And the door opens to a sea of musky fur and black-eyed wild things that all stare at you from behind their masks. Their God-given masks. Not those other masks.
And they are then your children. The ones no one else wants. And there are as many reasons of the heart to carry on then than there ever were reasons of the practical mind at this point. It seems like a ridiculous question to ask, “what the fuck am I doing” when they are looking at you there, the orphans of a sooty sky draped in the tragedy of the ages.
But then the morning always comes. Doesn’t it? The foolish-hearted hates the morning. The foolish-hearted walks around outside the house fearfully, making sure there are no holes leading to the attic and no raccoon scat by the goldenrod and wonders at their own sanity.
But it is not insanity at all. It is simply that in darkness, the only thing we can see is the colours of our inner beings. And that makes some of us foolish-hearted. So what.
There are only four raccoons now. The autumnal skies have scattered the children to the wild. A soul spark of me is with them there out where the wild things sing.
The skunk, however, remains, having chased away two delivery men and a handyman. He is my guard-skunk. I’m rather fond of him at this point.
I’m not the only foolish-hearted person:
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