April 20, 2012

My favorite time of morning, just before full light when the sky fades into that deepest blue, almost black but not quite.  Though it's early, there are birds already awake, crooning for love, or just joy, making clear sweet sounds in the almost dark.

Friday, end of the week, and this has seemed to be longer than most.  Is it not strange how time can be so . . . flexible.  Yes, we all have the same physical hours, but I am sure that they don't all feel the same, and this last week has felt like a very long one.  I also believe that the older you get time seems to pass faster, as on of the secretaries at school claimed.  She said her childhood summers seemed now to have lasted forever, and the last two weeks of school an eternity.  I agree with her, time has seemed to speed up, which is why this is so unusual, and worth nothing.  There is no figuring out why this week has seemed more like two, but the feeling is there.

There is something quiet and fragile about this poem yet it runs as deep as the dreams it tells about, and though the dream world is fleeting, how often does it color the morning, even far into the day, with glimpses of things barely conceived or imagined.

My Clothes Lie Folded for the Journey

Dreamed some rain so I could sleep.

Dreamed the wind left-handed
so I could part its mane and enter
the dance that carries the living, the dead, and the unborn
in one momentum through the trillion gate.

Dreamed a man and woman
in different attitudes of meeting and parting

so I could tell the time,
the periods of the sun,
and which face my heart showed,
and which is displayed to a hidden fold.

Dreamed the world an open book of traces
anyone could read who knew the language of traces.

Dreamed the world is a book.  And any page
you pause at finds you
where you breathe now,

and you can read the open
secret of who you are.  As you read,

and other pages go on turning, falling
through the page before you, the sound of them the waves
of the waters you walk beside
in your other dreams of the world
as story, world as song, world
you dreamed you were not dreaming.

Dreamed my father reading out loud to me,
my mother sewing beside me, singing
a counting song,

so I wouldn't be afraid to turn
from known lights toward the ancestor of light.

~ Li-Young Lee ~ 

World you dreamed you were not dreaming, and which world is that?  What is the world but a dream we all agree to inhabit, to find the meaning of it, to notice it and keep on noticing it.  The comfort of someone who loves you and shares that dream, the father reading, the mother sewing and singing, fear held beyond the door so that we can sit there in the light, safe and full of that ordinary peace.   The ordinary morning becoming filled with light, the crows flying past, calling out in their hoarse voices, the tiny sounds of wrens or sparrows just outside the window beginning their hunt for food, for safety.  The sky streaked with cloud, dark against the pale sunrise, is deepening to hold all that it must hold.  And again time is carrying me, or I am carrying it off into the day, where it's passing will seem unsteady but beat like the metronome, set to it's own pace, and mine just trying to keep up  . . .