Snippet #1293366

Myr let her ears guide her to the bank of a river, and she smiled upon seeing it. She could almost feel the purity of the water, as certainly as she could discern the smooth stones beneath what must have been at least four feet of transparent fluid. The roar of a waterfall could be heard a ways upstream, but this far down, it was mostly the quiet trickling that reached her ears.

Kneeling upon the grassy bank, then, the monk dipped her small bits of stoneware in the flow, scrubbing with her thumb so that all trace of the salve was carried away in the current. She had no reservations about returning the stuff of the earth to its source; her medicine would no more poison the river than a leaf would. Setting these beside her to dry, she bent over the water and cupped some in her hands, sipping of it with the relish only simple things could provide. Filling her waterskin once more to the brim, she contemplated returning to the camp immediately, but discarded the thought as unnecessary. Were she truly needed, she had not gone to the trouble of making herself difficult to find.

Instead, she moved back a bit from the bank itself and crossed her legs into the lotus position. It may be beneficial to run through her sequence of slow stretches later, but for now, her mind sought the quiet of meditation. Lids fluttered closed over violet eyes, and Myr's breathing became measured and regular. So much had happened today; it seemed in retrospect like it had passed with alarming speed, but all days were the same, in the end. Perspective was what changed.

Or perhaps circumstance. She had to admit, if someone had told her yesterday that she would find herself in the company of a disguised female knight, a rather outspoken thief who would know of herbs, a most philosophical pirate and an assassin with the Dark God's own eyes, she would probably have politely suggested that perhaps it was not meet for them to imbibe quite so heavily if they wished to keep their health about them. And yet, here she was. The world could be quite the odd place sometimes.

Each thought, she allowed to slip away, instead opening herself to the pure sensory information of the world around her, the gentle music of the running water, the rustle of the leaves through trees, the fresh scents of herbs and clean water, the solidity of the ground beneath her, the steady cadence of her own heartbeat... slowly these things ceased to be individual pieces of information and became cohesive, a whole.

We are not apart from what lies around us. When you have come to understand this, you will know peace. For what could trouble the very fabric of the world itself? The individual is but subservience to a privileged set of experiences. Forgo the privilege of what you think is your own and instead embrace everything about you. Do not choose to be this or do that. Rather simply be. This was a lesson that as a child, she had struggled to grasp, as most of them did. In the end, though, it had come to make a certain kind of sense to her, and the idea was most comforting, she had found.