PILLARS

Slabs of Prussian blue laid by a thick brush on leaves and vines and the broken masonry of a broken empire. Twilight midtones laid over a grounding of deepening black as the sun sank from view, a last wild stroke of pink-purple that failed to complete the canvas. Jagged oppressive blue jungle, the sweat of leaves cloying to the skin of the last villagers to go home. Crickets and mosquitoes and the strange grunts of the night beasts reverberating through the ruined halls of the shrine. The jungle's dark, damp heartbeat.
An orange pinprick appeared in the darkening. A lone incense stick in a chipped cup of rice. He put out his match and smiled with quiet satisfaction, heedless of the itching discomfort of insectbite and sweat. No priest's beads or finery had he, no censer or great book. A single figure sitting in near darkness on the broken steps of a broken house of a deity long departed.
Yet his smile spoke of secrets he alone knew.

Inbreathe. Gently intone guttural, mellifluous words whose meanings you know not.  Your jaw aches as your tongue moves in unfamiliar ways; it stumbles over a syllable. The meaning changes. You blanch. Your heart trembles. You start again.
Inbreathe. Wind rushes through the upper reaches of you, a downward journey to your deepest secrets. It teaches you to let go, to float on the wordstream flowing out your mouth, and in the shadows of the mysterious words you glimpse, briefly, something that needs no translation. Something you know and have always known. It vanishes before you can truly understand what you have seen. But you know it's out there, waiting to be found.
Your brow touches the earth, but your soul is full of clouds.

Pillars reaching towards the sky, gilt-lined capitals with their precious stones flashing beneath a radiant sun. Temples and palaces and the statues of gods and kings, waves lapping at a harbour scented with spices and strange oils from distant lands. A curious silence in the marketplace as the merchants refrain from their usual haggling, charging the customers the true price at the outset of the deal. There are no smiles, and the air hangs heavy like a weight over the bazaar, a miasma choking the joy out of commerce. Flies settle on the supine forms of beggars. The docksides are empty. For three weeks now there has been no wind, no ships - no trade.
Priests are consulted and after great ceremony they produce the verdict of the gods: the wealth of the city is an affront to heaven. Material pursuits have blinded the people to the tending of the spirit. The winds will blow again when the last gold coin vanishes from the city.
Humbled, the merchants and princes and strip off their goldleafed robes and empty their vaults and bare the city of all traces of that metal. Treasure ships are loaded high and sent out beyond the waters of home.
There they consign the city's wealth to the gods and the sea that made them rich. The gold glimmers beneath the surface for a while. And is lost.

With age we grow a great carapace of responsibility, a massive spiky shell around the soft and timid thing in the centre. It is a gentle being and the laughter of childhood is not too distant that it does not wish to dance, to sing, to paint, to soar. Yet we have confined this innermost part of our selves within a cage, a fortress meant to protect it from a world we suspect to be cruel. So that our naked souls are not hurt and cut and pierced upon the bristling defences and pretences of those around us.
We long to shed our skins, to let go of these things we don't need and show our true forms. Sans shell. Sans flesh. Sans bone. Thought and soul, we can travel light, you and I. For in the end we were not so different after all.

At the highest peak a pile of smoothened stones. Each stone cradled in the arms of a pilgrim as they have made their way up the old road carved onto the mountainside by forgotten hands. A treacherous path even in antiquity and after centuries of neglect now almost impossible. Still, every few years someone makes an attempt to reach the shrine – the local law enforcers resignedly clearing away the twisted remains after the inevitable slip, and the long, awful fall.
If you could make it to the summit and see the shrine for yourself – you would find each stone marked; with paint curiously fresh or faded into nothingness, with etchings smoothed by the elements, with chalk, ink, blood and dye. Writing in languages local and impossibly distant, a pluralistic conference of prayer, praise and rebuke as people from all faiths and none have journeyed to this spot, to speak their piece.
A long road to travel, with the danger of being cut painfully short, and at the end the slimmest, some would say nonexistent, chance to communicate something to... someone. To remind the universe that you were, briefly, here.
Perhaps this reminds you of something else.