🌟 New to Hearthlight? You can start your journey here or catch up on the last week’s entries below. From lost rings to imaginary birds, the past few days have been full of quiet magic and unexpected kindness. Or, just jump into Day 9.
📅 Heads-up! We’re skipping Friday and Monday this week while I’m away. Hearthlight will still be here when we return, and the cat probably won’t have burned it down. Probably.
Today’s prompt: “You climb a mountain and look out over the village below. What do you see, and how does the view affect your mood?”
Today’s music: Breeze by Black Lions Beatz. 🎧 Listen on SoundCloud.
The Mountain View
There was a small mountain rising at the back of Hearthlight. This morning saw it wreathed in a smoky halo of fluffy cloud. The mountain looked like something from a storybook: simple, with green tree-studded slopes. It was almost odd to see it; it wasn’t large, perhaps half a kilometre high, and had a simple calm that invited my feet for a walk.
I asked at the pub’s front desk for a packed lunch, and they returned with a small satchel. The concierge, a robust man named Bernard, explained it contained everything I’d need for the day. If I hadn’t been here a week already, I might have demanded to know how he presumed to understand what I’d need, but it turned out that Hearthlight seemed to know me more than I knew myself.
The pack was a comforting weight that spoke of more than a single sandwich inside. I reckoned I’d need it; the baby mountain behind Hearthlight was a good half-hour’s walk away, and getting to the top, no matter how modest a hill, was likely to leave me feeling as though I’d earned my lunch.
The gentle hike up the mountain’s slopes was calm. There wasn’t anyone here, which didn’t surprise me; Hearthlight was a hamlet of fewer than a hundred souls, and I suspected they all had better things to do than follow me up a hill.
The path wound in a snakes-and-ladders jig, never alarmingly steep. It was mostly covered in shale, tightly stamped by the passage of time and many feet. It felt like people were at home on this mountain, welcomed by it. And it made me feel welcomed by them, and how them blazing this trail let me follow in their footsteps with ease.
A few sections had boards laid to prevent mishaps over small bubbling brooks or eroded sections. I imagined that the person whose job it was to put the boards down lived a good life; they got to be outside, do simple and honest work, and know with certainty they’d helped a stranger from turning an ankle.
It took about an hour to reach the summit. The top of the mountain was mostly flat, a quiet glade ringed by low shrubs and bushes that offered a little shelter from a wind that felt keener up here than in the hamlet. Some hero had lugged a stone table and bench setup here. The stone was a pale grey, with lichen clinging to the sides. The stone benches were probably not bolted down, but they also looked like they weighed seven tonnes a piece, so I left them where they were and sat.
Time to open the satchel. Inside was:
A small selection of cut sandwiches;
A still-cool bottle of beer;
An also-still-cool bottle of water (less exciting than the beer, but more sensible); and
A painter’s set.
Wait, what?
Yep: Bernard had packed in a small spiral-bound artist’s sketchbook, some brushes, and one of those old bright yellow Crayola watercolour sets. It had seen some use, but previous artists hadn’t mixed all the colours, so the blues, greens, and yellows hadn’t turned into a uniform brown.
It provided a dual purpose for the water. Bernard might have wanted me to stay hydrated, but he also wanted me to record a memory.
I munched through a sandwich and enjoyed the beer, wondering what I should paint. The sky? The mountaintop? No; while both would have been fine choices, they didn’t feel like they honoured Hearthlight and its many gifts.
I turned to look over the hamlet and the valley it nestled in. I was going to need a lot of green for this. I wet the paint and set brush to paper. It reminded me of a time as a child when hours were free and it didn’t matter what you drew. I was no artist, that’s for sure! It wasn’t how the universe had stacked my atoms when it put them next to each other. But it gave me a sort of feral freedom: I knew what I painted would be objectively bad, which meant it didn’t matter. That child inside me who remembered painting? He didn’t care, either.
I sat painting until the day turned into early afternoon, and some cloud cover joined me and upset the light. I admired my painting. Crude, by any standard. Ancient cave murals had more action. But this piece was exactly how Little Me™ would have done it: with bold colours, fearless and unafraid to show it to people.
Perhaps that’s what I needed: a reminder that creation as an act was as important as the product it made. We can’t all be Picasso, but that doesn’t stop our inner child from wanting to draw stars on the canvas of heaven.
I packed away the paints and took one last look from the summit. The wind had shifted. Hearthlight was lit with afternoon gold, that kind of light that forgives mistakes and makes even crooked brushstrokes look deliberate.
My painting wasn’t a masterpiece, but I’d made something. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe making something is how we remind the world we’re still here.
Roll result? One satchel of snacks, one skyward perch, and the kind of painting only someone who was really there could make.
XP gained: 1 Crayola masterpiece, 1 inner child high-five, and partial custody of the colour green.
Ready for Day 10?
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