I am sitting under a tree. The ground is soft and green, the kind of green hillock you only find in east Ohio. It's a color I think of as not just _a_ green but THE Green, a color so brilliant and vibrant and cool and warm at the same time that all other greens can only be considered pale imitations. I can feel the bark of the Oak I am leaning against through my shirt, smell the damp soil and the rain in the air.

My eyes close; I breathe in the green and the silence one last time.

Standing, I put one hand on the Oak. "Strength," it whispers, "Continuing. Strength. Life." I thank it for the shelter from my nightmares and the drizzle and pick my barefoot way down from the hill, sliding in the slippery wet grass. Woods creep close in to the slope; by the time I reach the bottom I can no longer see the light from the clearing behind me.

I have been here before.

Gods walk here. Gods and spirits, "little people" and some mortals... and those of us who've been called or stumbled in accidentally.

I know where I'm going.

There is no path here, only the grey-brown of trunk and the green filtering in from above. Today it's dark; the sun is hidden by clouds, but I know where I'm going. Every tree is different, but living and true. "Strength" "Wisdom" "Love" "Alive" they shout silently. I hear them, but the only actual sound is the wind brushing through branches. I was here once, rooted and stretching for the sun; I know some of these trees.

There is a field ahead of me. I know it will be full of wild flowers and a grass so green you can drown in it. On the other side of that field is a small house... more properly a hut, I suppose. Inside that house is a warm fire that will never die, both hearth and forge. The air seems colder around me in anticipation of standing in the heat of that fire and my steps quicken.

I break from the edge of the trees into the field and pull up short. She is standing there, across the sea of grass. Her shining eyes are the source of the fire in every hearth, the spark that ignites the mind of every poet, the heat that melts even iron.

People studying her stories wonder how a single goddess could embody all of these things, but to me there is no question. She is beautiful in a way that I cannot comprehend or describe. It occurs to me that the image I see is like a pinprick in cardboard used to glimpse an eclipse, that all of this, the field, the hut, the fire, the woman, are only windows onto something that would blind me if I tried to look at it head on. She is not _a_ spark, she is THE Spark, not _a_ fire, but THE fire.

She smiles at me across the field, amused by my presence. I realize I came here under my own power this time. No accident, no call. She nods.

I open my eyes. More green, but a different green. A miniature rose that has nearly run its course and the Wandering Jew that has taken possession of my bedroom window. Colonial figures in white porcelain, with gilt edges, nestle into the green, a man and a woman, the base of my grandmother's old bedside lamp, and piles and piles of books on the shelves beneath. Yes, I do have something approaching thirty books less than six inches from my bed and vines that I sometimes find myself sharing a pillow with.

For a moment, my inner dialogue (because you can't call it a monologue if it's more than one voice) is silent and then the Grace of the goddess of the Fire ebbs.

"Yes," I say to my voices, "I am ready for today. Yes," I say, "I am capable. I know what I'm doing." I'm not really certain of this, mind you, but if I'm not firm and confident with them, my voices can paralyze me.

I wonder idly if She considers it blasphemous that I used Her name for a character that is essentially a demigod, but of music, not fire. No, I think She'd have let me know by this point. Maybe She's amused because there's no fire, but there's Smoke... I have a quiet laugh and roll over to look at the time.

My husband is lying next to me and like so many mornings I find my breath caught when I wake up and he's there. He is like the images of the gods, a window that opens onto something I can never comprehend or describe but that is so beautiful that it burns me.

I don't really know how long I sat there, just watching him sleep, because I never made it so far as to look at the time. Every day I think to myself, "is it possible to contain more love than I feel today?" and every day I find that there's more than the day before.

We've been living together for nine years as of sometime around now (I don't know the exact date, though I do know that we talked about the fact that we weren't "just" friends anymore on May 25 of that year). Nine years. Is it possible to see someone every single day for nine years and still be so incredibly in love with them? Obviously it is, or I wouldn't still be here, but it seems so incredible to me.

I don't know how he does it. It seems like he loves the very things about me that make other people grit their teeth. I'm loud. I'm obnoxious. I have problems with authority and tend to be loudly and obnoxiously opinionated about politics and religion and I'm not afraid to say so in polite company. He's not embarassed when I'm the only one on the dance floor. He doesn't care that I tend to wear my ripped and tattered paint clothes when I go to the store or that I am amused by the Brookfield clerks turning their noses up at me because of it.

Speaking of whom, he's awake now so I should probably end here and start my day...