The Green Dragon, The Lost Boy and the Flag Beyond the Stars

The Green Dragon, The Lost Boy and the Flag Beyond the Stars
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There was a storm far far beyond the beautiful dark mountains, growing in the air. Lightning crackled. You couldn't see it but you could feel it. Feel its danger. Sometimes it seemed exciting, stupid, but sometimes the destruction it may cause could play on your mind. What if my house got struck by a falling tree? My most valued possession lost forever.

Oh but what if, just maybe that storm never came? Perhaps it might just stay safely behind the cover of the mountains?

Yet then it came and this was no storm we felt, it never was. It came from nowhere one day. One fine and beautiful morning, when the first hint of spring was in the air. A giant, angry, screaming, hissing Green Dragon came and it brought with it the fury and rage and anger that only love and hate and loss can bring. Filled with despair I ran for the cover of my house but it was no use, my house was gone, my protection was lost and inside it everything that i held close. Gone. Never to return.

Only sitting. Nothing else to do, I sat and sat some more. Sometimes my eyes were open and sometimes closed. I wished for anything, nothing really. And for how long did I sit? Sometimes I still sit.

Unknown to me, a tiny bird came one day and in a faraway strange voice told me to get up and follow her. She suggested that the life that had been lost inside my house could not be reclaimed, adventures lay ahead and with them I could learn to start again. Grow to believe again. Grow to live again.

She said who knew if that Dragon might return and with it the darkness that it wrought.

And then the tiny bird flew away one day. I thought she would never return.

I waited hoping. After the very depths of my heart called out for her, she returned with hesitation.  She told me to follow, in life we have free will and if her will brought her to fly away she would and that her gift of flight was the greatest gift of all, never take it for granted - we explored like children on a summers evening, fearless and praying that the days would never end. They never did.

Bright lights, mermaids, spacemen and monsters of the seas. We roared through our adventures, to far off ancient castles and through forests filled with talking trees; we ignored the parasitic mistletoe as it tried to poison our ears. Only happiness fell upon us.

High above me all the time in front, brave and strong, keeping watch of the Green Dragon, the tiny bird protects. With flag held high for only me to see, that she is there when storms gather, when darkness grows. She guards me still.