Write on Wednesday: 17

The Write on Wednesday Spark - The nature of place
Think about a place in nature that feels special to you. Perhaps it is somewhere you visited as a child. Or maybe you share a special outdoor space with your own children. This place, this space will be your prompt for this week's writing exercise. Write about a particular natural geography, a natural place or space close to your heart. Tell us about the weather, the landform , the creatures who live there, what the place means to you and why. You can write prose fiction, poetry, non-fiction and/or a photographic narrative. You might mix the landscape with a personal story. Wherever the prompt take you...Let us peak into your place. 


It seemed like thousands of steps to me back then. The number has decreased over time, but the experience is still the same. With every step you take -from one broken stone march to the next- you are transported through time. You imagine the thousands, tens of thousands of people who have climbed up the steep slope. Those who came in hope, hope for some solace, hope for protection or maybe to just find peace.
Now the reasons may be the same, there may be people just searching for something that they think lies in the past for that is all they see in the old stones that lie above them. I can only see a kind of sad beauty. Like that of a woman who in her prime would have spent her nights dressed in fine gowns and danced around the ballroom, and who -after so many years have passed- now only sees people in passing that she no longer recognizes or understands. 
But even in her age, in her empty hallways no longer holding off the wind, in the rooms that no longer support the roofs that have long since died away, I find a everlasting beauty. Because even as the fortress falls to pieces there is one place where the beauty still grows.
You can feel the sweat pearling from your brows and down your neck by the time you reach the top of the stairwell. There are so many stairs to walk under the beating sun that many turn back, the children complain, in their minds there is nothing in the old fortress but the old ramblings of an unknown memory.
I am grateful for the solitude when I reach the top. To run my hands across the ancient stones and take the steps down the well known path to the place where the beauty lingers. To the four ancient trees. To the garden of time.