The entire morning was suspended as a world of frozen timelessness, stretched out toward the horizon. I chose my favourite paintbrush, one with horsehair bristles and a well-worn handle of carved bone. Cool in my grip, it was at times more like a voodoo amulet than an artistic tool. I could sometimes feel it’s power as I painted, letting it flow into the liquid colours, its energy mingling freely with their wavelengths.

As I posed the brush, it became a scorpion ready to strike in a flurry of hues and tones, poisonous and captivating. I rolled my head and took a deep, calming breath. In my right hand, the dry brush dashed across the clean white canvas. It traced out an ancient talisman that I had come to recognize as a sigil for creative inspiration. I could almost see a violet light dispersing from the canvas for every stroke. Intoxicated with an artist’s anticipation, I began to select my paint from various pots. I invented a brew on my palette with the precision of a seasoned apothecary. As always, I craved the perfect colours to record any of the beautifully corrupted images that leaked into my mind’s eye.

At the far end of my tiny cottage, the blaze in the fireplace crackled softly as it danced. It became a tangle of little elemental spirits happily leaping at each other with every lap of the fire’s tongue. The aroma of pine burning mingled with the fumes from my acrylic paints. It was otherworldly, that smell. From that moment, nothing could cleave my attention from the canvas until my task was complete. The smell circled me in my concentration. It enveloped me and protected me. The frost gathering on the fragile panes of the window to my left gave the scene a dreamlike quality, one that I could never quite become accustomed to. I was completely enrapt just then, under the spell of the morning. It beckoned me across the expanse of softly dusted grass, beyond a barricade of icicles and through the creeping crystals on my windowpanes. It awakened a part of me that sunlight alone could never reach.

At last, when the birds were beginning to clear their musical throats, the soft pink of sunrise compelled me to recreate it. I was enthralled by the simple, eternal beauty of the new day. I lifted my brush and watched it dance across the canvas, possessed. It told a story of the trees keeping watch outside my cottage window and of the world below that they would never be a part of. The crisp morning was full of sorrow for these forgotten tree spirits. The myth and magic of their past had long since slipped away in fragments. I was humbled by the knowledge that my brush attributed to them. Branch by branch, stroke after stroke, weaving their majestic aura.

These two stood alone, naked witnesses to the passage of time. Each had beheld the daily awakening of the distant village for countless generations. Their bark was as the flesh of wise grandmothers, smooth and craggy textures in perfect unison. Their branches sprouted a continuous chronicle of nature’s battles with time, their roots sliding deep into the Earth and spidering out, steadfast. The unyielding silhouettes stood in contrast to the village stirring under its blanket of snow, a monument to their unspoken memories.

Memories recorded in the poetry of my brush.