The Temptation to Dream

It is tempting to dream when this much is given to us. We might say, “How can I hold this?”

We might trip over our sentences in search for a bee or a fly in this stillness.

Or a bald eagle might come along fiercely letting sound out without the slightest restraint, or the car next door drives up, gets locked loudly without concern for stillness, yet stillness is strong and knows so much, even the faintest yellow leaf floating a trickle downstream, headed to the ground someday will know it belongs.

Stillness reminds us we are just where we belong, and the sounds will be part of it, even if they are unrestrained and inconsiderate.

Finally after almost 36 years on this planet, you’ve visited this place and left and returned enough times to know it will be recognizable to those not present, or perhaps more holographically, all are present.

When all and everything is present, all is present, the fractals around you reaching out their farthest fingers to greet the fractals within you, who know their names in their language, the language of geometric love.

The knowing that Math is Love envelops you, even though they left that out at school, like they tended to leave out all of the most important things, ever sidestepped in the quest to dominate (or digress).

You played video games, though, that knew of these worlds of love, whether Tetris or Zelda, the love of shapes themselves may have been hidden but was always known as you swam in circles with water wings on, flapping and splashing when that was all you knew how to do, and when you had a shape that could only be loved, chubby and small, head full of curls.

And then you grew older; the love in you became less and less apparent, so slowly you missed it, the process undocumented you could say, but the scientific method didn’t say anything about measuring the perception of love, at least not when you learned it, or where you practiced it at a lab table with microscopes observing protozoan.

And they didn’t tell you this was only part of the story either.

They didn’t tell you these calculations might fail you someday while you were out looking for life.

Love.

And when you felt unsatisfied each day coming home to watch reruns of Saved By The Bell and eat frozen pizza, no one said a thing. There were no issues if your grades were high, so you only needed to learn all these things in their partially taught ways that would have been deeply disturbing if we didn’t have the word “boring”.

You never believed in boredom but always knew grief existed and how did boredom become the acceptable substitute, like Splenda or citric acid? Tastes a little off, don’t know why, swallow it and be done.

Grief on the other hand can be tasted in a freshly made lasagna or a well taught lesson and certainly in any well made art.

We single ourselves out, dreaming a new dream each night, when we go to other places in our searchings, knowing we can’t find it all in daylight, or even moonlight, we need to close our eyes and lose wake entirely to explore what might be going on: here, there or anywhere.