Meditative Prose

Tuesday, 12 February 2008

Sometimes I wake up and think about the state of the world, and wish it were just a bad dream, a false awakening, and I could pinch myself and really wake up. Maybe I’d find myself in a longhouse with my family and friends still asleep all around me and the embers still glowing in the fire pit, and a dog gnawing on a bone from the previous night. I’d work the embers into flames again, then step outside and walk on deerpaths to a spring to get water. As I carried the water back I’d look at the mature forest around me, greeting the morning light and the crows, the pines and the gray squirrels. By the time I got back home, everyone would be awake — really awake. Maybe I’d mention my nightmare to Sarah as she plaited her hair: that horrible dream that seemed so real, where the streams were poisoned and the air was fouled, and a hundred species went extinct each day, and the world was populated by six billion people who seemed to all be suffering, rushing from one place to the next, looking for something but never finding it. How sad for the people of that dying world. How lonely they must feel.

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