It Will Be Well

I have a hard time writing about Herne. I think it’s because I often try to explain him, or at least the history of my relationship with him. And that’s just too big a job, and maybe not one even suited for the kind of stories I know how to tell.

So I’ll just say this, with no explanation. And maybe, incomplete as it is, it will stand better than something more reasoned would do…

When the time comes for me to die, I hope that they will take me outdoors. I hope that it will be one of those unseasonably warm days in early October, when the sky is a clean, bald blue, and the maple trees are in flames and the oak trees have begun to smolder.

And I hope that someone will lay me down in a big field, with trees all around and the sun in the sky overhead, so I can feel the heat and the life of it in my body all day long. And then, at twilight, I would like to be moved to the edge of the woods. Let someone kindle up a big bonfire, and let me see the flames lighting up the undersides of the leaves, making them glow like stained glass out of the gloom of shadows. And then they should leave me, walk away and leave me there to wait in the fire and in the dark.

Photo credit: Petritap

And I will hear a sound, of hooves and creaking leather, and jingling tack. I will smell woodsmoke, but also sweat, and horses, and leather, and underneath it all, something cool and foreign, like the smell of rock dust or the earth beneath a stone.

And he’ll have come for me, warm and alive and dark and strong. And he’ll bend down, and pull me up before him, and we will go away together forever.

But in that moment before he takes me in his arms and wraps me in his cloak, I will be able to do what I never have been able to do in all my life till now: I will look into his face, fully into his face, and I will see his eyes.

Then let me die. It will be well.

So mote it be.