Thoughts flow like a river, moving seamlessly from one perception
to another. If one reflects backwards it is amazing the series of
musings that have been passed through in only moments. I start with
thinking about cleavers and end with the old oak the city cut down because
they said it had a deadly disease--oak wilt. I regretted deeply that
Z would no longer have a tree to climb. We read The Giving Tree
as their chainsaws moaned. Z cried. The city planted a bur
oak in its place and said that Z would be able to climb it. I guess
they meant when he's an old man because more than a decade later the limbs
are still too frail for even a child. Squirrels yes, but not a child.
Pause for a moment in your reading.
What are your thoughts? Where do they lead? Can you trace the map you have journeyed?
What a stimulating bunch of spark and crackle the brain is with all of its hidden wrinkles and grooves. Sometimes we laugh about poor, dumb Archer with his smooth walnut-size brain--it keeps his tail happily wagging though, doesn't it? He is always full of small hopes & joys.
How is it that with each approaching night the electric brain slows to a murmur, like a lullabye--our eyes drooping closed, snuggling down in our soft beds--and the brain pauses: quiet. In anticipation of the transition to the different role of dreaming where the brain becomes the artist splashing images upon a canvas in any which way it chooses. Not confined by the regulated, sentient self. We dream about things that we refuse to address in our waking lives. We dream about prohibited things: illicit sex, excrement, murder, gluttony. We dream about the unnaturally beautiful as well. Last night there was a room full of crystal rainbows. We are allowed images that we might otherwise judge trite: a little cheesy. We are innocent infants when we dream.
I have met two men who say they don't dream. I don't trust them.
So here my brain & I sit, at the center of the great coil of life--spiraling in like the layers of an onion. A place that no one else can share. Unless they too happen to be in the center of the great coil because in that dark, still, silent, crackling place lies the root of mystery and miracle. The amorphous collective unconscious where the soul of spirit is simultaneously deeply internal and expansively eternal. I can find the heart of distant worlds in this place.
I had meant to write about the yellow umbrella--to make a few notes & come back to writing later in the day. I guess my brain had quite different designs in mind. Out on a ramble.
3/2/2001
Ingrid Karklins