The Center of All

The day begins frosted in mists that drift in from the sea, a persistent fog that wets the concrete of the front stairway and the sidewalk that leads to the BART station. It blocks out the sun and the blue of the sky with its homogenous hues of gray on gray. I find it difficult to rise. I find it difficult to accept that this is day, this is morning, time to throw back bed sheets and sing to the world the way birds do. The darkness seems to mute out the possibility for song. It welcomes heavy jackets and lethargy in July. It feels like an extended night. I bring in the paper which has thoughtfully been encased in plastic to protect it from the wetness. The weeds poking up out of the cracks in the driveway are a welcome sight. I can smell their green life on the moist air. I can smell the sea that I can’t see nestled under its blanket of fog in the far distance. If the briny blue won’t sparkle, what else can? I shuffle back inside and add the paper to a pile on the floor. It grew during my absence, that little mountain of news so important that no one bothered to remove it from its protective plastic covers.
I am not yet affected by any of these details. The blazing sun and trail dust and tall evergreens and shimmering sea and winding roads are still burning bright in my chest. My present surroundings are muted, less real than the internal landscape impressed upon me during my recent voyage. I resolve not to let this bleak world outside infect and obliterate the vivid world thriving within. It occurs to me that I might be able to change this place by holding tight to that other. If I will not let it bleed out of me, if I hold it boiling inside of me, perhaps, everything around me will be infected by me rather than the reverse.
I sit at the kitchen table to write my dreams. It is hard not to nod off as I write. The pen moves, my eyes close. My mind so focused on dreams begins to slip into their gossamer halls once again and begin new adventures spun from the fabric of the old. Then I rouse my self, and scribble less than I would say if I was speaking in the language of a dream, and put the little book half away. It occurs to me that I should hide it, for these are my dreams meant to be kept from uninvited eyes. The mere occurrence of some intruding peepers peering over those pages lined with the symbols that signify the landscapes and occurrences of my inner world would pollute my dreams, my shining, sparkling dreams filled with the beat and pulse of a great heart that I feel, that I hold but do not own. That heart, it owns me. So that it doesn’t abandon me, I must keep it secret, keep it protected from the ill intentioned and habitual prying of others.
I was in a place where the ground was carpeted with dust as dry as flour. In some places, the dust had blown away and what remained was a rock hard tanned skin so dry that it was cracked. In some places velvety patches of yellow sage crawled along, alive and happy in a heat that killed off other things. Some yellow straws protruded here and there like whiskers from a chin. The trees dropped red peppercorns and tiny dried leaves to make a carpet of pink within stone lined paths around their trunks. They too thrived in the sun and the dry. Their skin was cracked and rougher than the earth, but the leaves on their limbs were green and these bowed over to lend shade as graciously as the limbs of any river willow. They’d brush my face and hair with those many delicate fingertips and shiver gaily in the evening breeze. Lizards shot like rocket ships over the terrain, made quick by the warmth. Hills rolled like brown waves all around me, their soft curves radiating some silent love reciprocated by the bright blue sky. Beaches of hot sand and smooth stones crawled out of the forest to kiss the waves. Tiny villages clung to the folds of mighty mountains and glowed with tender light when night invaded those folds with cold penetrating fingers.
All of this I have stored down in my bones, a magick elixir stopped within an ivory vial. It is my very marrow. Holding the skeleton of scenes together lie the winding roads, like sinews of muscle and tendon, the curving path between earth and sea. The road that binds all things. The glowing water of life, blue when the sun is high, gold when it begins to sink, and inky black when it is gone. The smell of salt. The fragrance of trees and ferns, of rushing streams and cascading falls. On my right hand; the immovable. On my left hand; the ever turbulent, both pressing me into a fine line, a path between the two. A passage between chaos and stability that is my eternal home, not a place of rest but a journey that is the center of all.
I am a margin between worlds, one dark and cool, one bright and warm, and I must be the mediator.