Of Doors and Dreams

Life is a series of doors we step through.  Each door leads to a new Universe.  These doors come to us as people, places or even activities.  Each person, for example, is the center of their Universe, and you become a satellite of them there just as they are a satellite within yours.  Some people do not step through many doors,  staying for the most part in the same Universe into which they were born.  This is okay, as each Universe is infinite and provides limitless experience.

I have always been eager to open new doors.  In my youth there were so many, and each opened into a world with even more exciting doorways available.  I flew through them daily, until the world from the year before, when re-visited, seemed alien to me and I had no place there.   Eventually I came to a point where the doors seemed to beckon to me, urging me to step through and thereby become as them.  This was a little frightening, and I got into the habit of searching out new doors which were similar but different to the future I was being urged toward.  I in effect invented my own doorways.

I would sit and think.  I would sit and dream.  I would use logic and analogy to come up with a plan.  Sometimes my depression would force me to act, and I would spin into a world where no one else had been before.  This has become a habit over the years.  Now I feel more comfortable sailing through an alien landscape than playing a role within the status quo.   But this kind of life, though tremendously rewarding, has depleted my power reserves over the years, especially financially.  For to get anywhere within a world, one must put down roots and gather reserves.  I’ve never done this.

A long time ago I realized we are all in prisons of our own making.   The only answer is to design your cell with as much care as possible.   Lately I’ve actually designed and created my prison cell from scratch, as it were.  From the porch of  this little dwelling I can sit and ponder a landscape of boundless beauty.  I can see mountains that are fifty miles away or watch the movements of tiny insects at my feet.  And yet, it is still a prison.

Now the doors aren’t appearing very often, and my imagination for inventing new doors seems to be wearing away as well.  Oh I still have big dreams, but I can’t imagine how to fund them.

If I only had a little dough.

 

A Wave of Wind

I was sitting in the shade looking at a dragonfly perched on the hood of my truck like a tiny hood ornament, thinking about how flies can stay in the vicinity even after a stiff breeze comes by.  Do they fly against the wind to keep in place?  Do they hide behind something until it passes?  Are they blown away and just replaced by flies from upwind?

These are the profound thoughts I was having when I noted a small roar off in the distance.  I’ve heard it before, and it was getting louder and closer.  It was the roar of wind blowing through the brush and trees of my desert vicinity.  As the roar became increasingly louder I could see the trees in the distance bending.  The roar of the wind was fluctuating as it approached, like a wave approaching the beach.  It was just about to break upon me.

As the wind hit I closed my eyes, but the sand and jetsam stung my bare skin like tiny needles.  I was then thinking I should have ducked into the shelter, but soon enough it passed.  A stool had blown over, and a wooden pallet, but most everything stayed in place, having been situated according to previous blasts across the land.

I looked over at my dragonfly hood-ornament, still in place.  The flies would be back soon.