Dreamer

The prompt for this writing was a quote by Mark Doty

"The dreamer beneath black leaves and a spatter of summer stars."

April 5, 2010

Lying on the earth, summer night, frogs croaking, the grand-daddy frogs harrumphing, crickets, cicadas surrounding me with sound, holding me like a hammock as I lay with my sister and friends watching the night sky. The black leaves are but a frame, no weight at all. There are no thick ponderous oak branches moving slowly in the wind, just a kaleidoscopic shifting of black shape as we look at stars. We are wiggly squiggly bodies flung on top of sleeping bags, moving around rocks, poking a friend, "Look at that! Did you see that shooting star? Oh there's the north star. There's Orion's belt, do you see it?"

"Where, where?" Oh the joy of it, discovering this magical universe that lives behind the light waiting for everyone to darken down so their millions of light yeras away light can find our hungry eyes and help us dream. Those nights of laughter, wonder, warmth swirl in my mind like the stars themselves, waiting for the lights to go down so they can again be revealed and dance. It catches me. I thought I knew what I would write about. I had a straight, clear idea which now fades out into the swirl of starlight. That glowing presence is all I need to start my body relaxing, shoulders fall, mind tingles. This Petri dish of life that I rested in held so many visions of possibility but not just visions. It held the rich bubble of joy that rested in my belly and just below and surrounding my heart. That sense of my roots shooting deep into loamy earth as my hair blew wild with the wind hiding stars in its tangles, that love and connection, that is what I knew then. There was no doubt that I was earth's baby and sky's child. I knew it in my dreams when I would fly--but not too high--for I loved the weight of the earth as well as the freedom the wind brought me. Now I would smear myself with mud, paint myself earth brown before I fly off for a moonlit gambit.

I must be mad but I don't care anymore. This freedom, this joy to taste and touch all parts of existence is so exquiste, so utterly satisfying, I could no more turn away from it than a mother from her child. Ahh, but I knew, I knew that I could wiggle into the night soil and visit the stars and then, just before I finally closed my eyes, so tired from a day of running and working and being good and staying out of trouble if I could figure out trouble before I splashed into it, the blackened leaves would move and dance around the sky until I couldn't tell if the leaves were moving or it was the earth that was dancing, carrying me in its night song to sway oh so elegantly along to the songs the frogs played bass to and the crickets alto but it was the stars who sang soprano so high, so impossibly high that I couldn't quite hear them but I knew they were singing and my ears tingled with the beauty of it until finally, even my ears closed, drooping heavily and I slept.