Lying Eyes

It was the kind of gray morning when you knew that the sun would soon burn through the fog and brighten the land with its hot lumens. The trees saturated with recent rains shot out millions, no billions of leaves in a myriad of shapes and sizes. Isabella could not count all the leaves she saw, but she often wondered how many they were, and if God knew the answer. Scurrying from hiding place to hiding place ran busy little chipmunks and squirrels while butterflies and bees moved from honeysuckle to lily to take their daily bread. Flies, fleas and mosquitoes buzzed through the air looking for humans to annoy; cardinals, robins, and starlings in and out of trees foraged food for babes in nests. The air already felt steamy, round and thick with heat and humidity, reminding her that before civilization came, the place had been a swamp, meant to delight mosquitoes and lizards, not human beings. Isabella wondered what invisible elements made the air so heavy and oppressive one day and so light the next. Flowers  fixed in earth, stood all around in all the stages of their short lives; clusters of buds peeking their color, pastel yellows and pinks, deep bloody reds; lonely royal purple irises looking tall and regal. A deer here, a person there, buildings, and a river all filled the landscape with a visible display of the evidence of life and the illusion that space is a void.

Space, a highway of the supernatural rich with particles of electrons transmitting language, images, and sounds invisibly through the air and through walls. Air, busier than land with sounds of planes barging through clouds, loud chirping birds sending messages to others far away, engines powering metal to move passengers and baggage, jam packed with invisible electricity and full of spirits.

Spirits good and evil, real, anonymous, shrewd, protective, busy in battle, winning some, losing others for King or devil. Persuasive companions of human intelligence, relaying messages between friends, transmitting thought prayers up the line from angels to God’s ears, embodied spirits, bodiless spirits, using the power of invisibility to heal and to destroy. Spirits cannot be bought or sold, their value beyond material gold. Spirits penetrate flesh as electrons through metal walls to haunt and to heal. Holy spirits, Holy Spirit of the Church-Militant wages war on evil spirits to deliver gods home. Which thoughts are your own Isabella? And which are the evidence of spirit wars. Whose side are you on today lady soldier?