So here I sit, idle in front of the profound execution of justice unfolding my before eyes, and I am stupefied. I’ve survived the journey to this place, and it took miles of suffering and doubt, yet here I am now, and all of my power has been whisked away. I’m nothing more than an onlooker—a stroke of the brush without thought, a ray of the sun left un-noted in the desert. My mind has been stirred like broth simmering over heat. I want to go home, I want to leave this place, I want to brush myself off and return to my old day-to-day life with a day-to-day job. But the pot still stirs and boils, contradictory and unable to find confidence in one single thing, conflicted and lacking uniformity. The breeze tousles the leaves, a father running his gristly fists through his son’s hair. The world is waiting. The world drifts and groans and scampers and flows, but it is still and it is waiting and I seldom know what for. Before me, the lone tree observes the silence. It’s branches are dancing with the wind, rebellious and shivering. The wind heaves forward, waving banners through the clouds. The great everything has taken a side, and I’ve been swept along with it. And the lone tree, the head of the court, gazes through me without eyes to gaze with. A squirrel scampers out into the clearing, his eyes darting without purpose. The onlookers are merciless, drilled into silence, and his panic arises into fear. His small head winds back into a dreadful squeal, a howl of the wolves, a roar of the bears, a hoot of owls. Yet it is not mighty. It is pitiful, it is pathetic, and it’s time has passed. Now there is only despair as company. And here I sit, idle, stupefied, before profound justice. For what the squirrel is prosecuted I cannot know. Yet I am entranced, myself being nothing yet the world being everything. The world is still. The wind scarcely moves, the grass not dares to sway. It is an indescribable, heavy, unbearable silence that can’t be ruptured even by the unspoken guilty charge that has been delivered. And the howl is gone, and the painting emerges back into motion, and the grass sways, and the wind gently tousles the leaves, and the father loves the son, and the son loves the father. My own heart seems to rise into my chest, allowing breaths to filter through my nose and blood to flow with a sigh of relief through my pores. But the squirrel still stands, stupefied, idle, under the undeniable power of justice. Tentatively, at first, the vultures swoop down and balk at the stillness of it all. The spiders spread their spindly legs of it’s fur. There is no protest, no resistance. The squirrel is frozen in time. But then a battle begins. The vultures peck each other apart and the spiders burrow into deep mud. Squirrels leap from tree to tree, mourning and vengeful, yet fall from great heights as their adversaries rejoice. Blood seeps into the ground and the sky screams in woe, but the battle remains. The vultures fight for the squirrel, the squirrels fight for revenge, the spiders fight for shelter, the wind spirals and hisses through branches. Yet they are fighting for nothing. The squirrel’s fate has been delivered. There is nothing for it to live for, and nothing to die for. And now, frozen forever in nothingness, the squirrel’s blank eyes stare into the tree’s invisible ones. There is peace—such horrid, violent, atrocious peace there, where only the living can ever truly die.