At the edge of the frozen pond, where the path into the forest begins, a tall figure stands in the falling snow. No one remembers him arriving. He is simply there every winter, wrapped in red velvet the colour of a heart, an old net thrown over his head like a shawl, two red embers burning where a face should be.
In one hand he holds a wheel. Not a jewel, not a sword: a plain wooden wheel from a cart that once carried someone's harvest to market. From a long pole beside him hang bells of brass, and they ring whenever the wind decides, never when anyone asks them to.
The villagers call him the Guardian of Fortune. They come at night with their wishes: a better year, a lucky harvest, a sale, a child, a cure. They whisper them into the snow and wait for the wheel to turn.
But the Guardian does not turn the wheel. He only keeps it. The old poet who walked through hell saw the same truth: Fortune is no one's servant and no one's friend. She moves the empty treasures of the world from one hand to another, from people to people, and pays no attention to who curses her and who prays. All anyone can do is decide what to be while the wheel is turning.
"That she might change at times the empty treasures
From race to race, from one blood to another,
Beyond resistance of all human wisdom."
Dante, Inferno, Canto VII, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The artist minted this work in a hard winter with a single line: "Life is a wheel of fortune, and now I have a chance to spin it." It opened the season of masks, and the same old cart wheel turns up again years later in the saga: in the Black Queen's candlestick, and at the foot of the log fortress of War.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2023.)
