DREAMS

A thousand, thousand dreams go lost
when the dawn comes
replaced, sometimes, by the songs of birds
or the shadows of tree branches
shifting on bedroom walls.
Thoughts of the coming day,
memories of the evening's last discourse
reviewed over and over until
awareness faded and welcome sleep descended.

Through the night the dreams come,
becoming more vivid and eventful
until, at last, we awake.
Sometimes the story remains
clear, bright, filled with emotions
only to fade into oblivion
over the next minutes
the memories having run their courses,
giving just the hint of the mysteries that occur
in a mind when, in the dreaming state,
it tries to make sense of a world that, when awake,
eludes us.

But oh the dreams!
The possible and the impossible mixed so thoroughly together
that they seem an impressionistic painting
or a message hidden in the sounds
of water flowing over rocks in a mountain stream.
Like a piece of art designed to
start, emerge, reform, become vividly clear
then fade into incomprehensibility
to exist only partially remembered
as a hint of experience rather than
the experience itself.

And isn't this like the first stages of love
or the transformation from seed to flower
or like the mosaic of a tidal pool
after each change of tide?
Isn't this like what truly happens to us
each day when we think
we are fully aware
but, in actuality, form a personal reality by what we
unconsciously attend to and ignore?
Much of our lives we live in shorthand,
little squiggles and jots
with just the outline of meaning
rather than the meaning itself.
With ease, what we experience can be reduced to
text and twitter.

Take your time. Take your time. Take all of your time.
It will never come again.
Use it all, and with purpose, so that each experience
is unique, just as each moment of reality
is unique.

Time is an artifact connected to movement
through a cosmos.
It is a way we measure our own brief passage
thorough space and is part of the continuous movement
that includes the relentless motion
of atoms in our bodies
and the angular momentum of the Earth
as it spins and revolves about the Sun
in a solar system that is only a tiny speck in the arm
of a spiral galaxy that is, itself,
one of billions of other galaxies
flying ever outward from a big bang.

Each moment contains a complete rebirth for everyone
and everything, as if it were a fleeting part of
a dream of some unseen
and unknowable power that exists
beyond all we can understand.

Can we afford to let any moment
pass unappreciated?

Jim Morgan  August 16, 2009