I’ve dubbed the basement apartment where I’m living “the cave” three houses down from Southern Utah University. Lately I’ve been having vivid dreams at night in the windowless bedroom where I sleep. You can smell the soil of the earth in the foundation. At night I leave the door open to hear the crickets. I share my living space with several room-mates; spiders, ants and centipedes. Those varmints and me, we co-exist! lol… There is a mystery linked to the bedroom. These dreams are wonderful. Some of them are on par with waking reality. Early this morning I dreamed I was floating over a very steep granite canyon somewhere far away. There was dark green grass growing in deep pockets and crevices and calm pools of water reflecting clouds in the sky. It was surreal. The aesthetics surpassed anything I’ve experienced in waking reality. I’ve always been a dreamer. It was Crazy Horse, the great Lakota man that referred to the dream world as closer being to reality and that our waking life was just a shadow of it.
For the past few weeks I’ve been doing quite a few solo hikes. The experience one gains hiking alone in the hills is quite different than hiking with groups of people. You drown in isolation and it swallows you like a blanket. A dense forest surrounds you and takes you far from life’s travails and into the corners of God’s holy mind. The wilderness is my home forever.
So I traverse through life a happy man of gratitude and I am the happiest of individuals. Nothing will take that power from me because it is a part of my spirit. I’ve discovered a beauty that most will never know. There are those who cannot recognize beauty when it surrounds them.
One day I may find my better half and then everything will be complete. There is a song that my mother always sung to me when I was a child, a song that I will sing to my future children. It is one of the most personal songs in my life and it goes like this:
“I know a place where no one ever goes.
There’s peace and quiet, beauty and repose.
It’s hidden in a valley behind a mountain stream.
And there I can find a place – a place where I can dream
Only a place of beauty to the eye,
Snow capped mountains rising to the sky.
Now that I know
That God has created this world for me.
For me. For me!The songwriter or poet is unknown…