Hard little lessons, hard little reminders

Last night, I was talking to my father after mum had drifted off to sleep. After the crisis, my parents have been under rough weather. Tough times usually complicate matters and so the fabric of home has become a little twisted lately.

I brewed some tea and in the dim light of the lamp, my father told me stories about the history of Gengis Khan and Akbar. When I listened to him, I wondered what kind of a person he was. One wouldn't think that so much crisis had befallen my father lately, or even through the course of his life. Something about the way my father tells stories or talks about distant histories of civilizations during troubled times like this...something about this anachronistic storytelling feels like walking through this rich and evergreen forest. You look around and you see that maybe some trees have been felled or some flowers have wilted and little portions may be dead for right now. But all this is just a trickle of time, a moving trace across an expanse that seems to go on and on but the forest knows that it's just a season.