While the Gathering is Good

A blue winter sky hung brightly over the lake. While the gathering was good, the ducks and geese worked the shallows gathering weeds and roots.  A gray squirrel scratched through the stark shadows of barren trees looking for overlooked acorns and hickory nuts. The sags along the trail were puddled and muddy, except for the northern slopes where remnants of two-day-old snow remained.  It was a winter day – a good day to be in the sun with other living things that appreciated the sunlight and the various states of water along the woods and lake.

I visited my mother yesterday and left her in the room far removed from woods or lake, left her in the gray light of her dreams. A walk through the woods along the lake changed the scenery of my own dreams, bringing light and focus on things immediate: the emerald mallard’s head, the track of water seeping through the leaves seeking the lake; the vapor trail of a plane thirty thousand feet into the blue.

There is a Turkish proverb: A heart in love of beauty never grows old.

I wonder if the beauty of the world was often apparent to my mother. She was prone to worry about things slithering, smelly or stingy. She preferred the indoors; the television. She warned against the dangerous path, the unfamiliar, or worse, the unknown. She worried about the night, about tomorrow or next week.  She invented things for the purpose of worrying.

I don’t know if she now lives in a world of worried dreams. But it seems that way. She mutters and grimaces. It could be troubled dreams, but it could be her broken hip, except that if she recognizes you, she’s ready to go – to go with you, to leave this place, to go with you to a place more familiar.

I miss the mother I have known for 60-plus years, but I cannot take her with me. So I am determined to see the details of the world: the small, the colorful, the movement of things subtle, the waffling lines and curves, the emerging and fading shapes. I am determined to hear the sounds hidden behind the distractions: the faint whistles, calls, rumbles and rhythms. Awareness is living. Learning is naming the small and the insignificant. By acknowledging the completeness of the world about us we build our dreams. In the end, the shape, the texture and the feel of our dreams may be all that remains.

From my mother I have learned that we might exit the world through our dreams, so we must take care to nurture them. As Lao-Tsu admonished us: “Taste the tasteless, magnify the small, increase the few, see simplicity in the complicated. Achieve greatness in little things.” In his song “It’s a Dream”, Neil Young sings about exiting the world via our dreams and leaving our memories “without any where to stay”. It is a sad song only for those left behind and for those who fail to nurture their dreams.

It's a dream
Only a dream
And it's fading now
Fading away
It's only a dream
Just a memory without anywhere to stay

Listen to the song: It’s a Dream