Yes, it’s spring, and we’re supposed (or so we’re told) to be dreaming of sunlight and warmer winds and life renewed.
But thanks to human attempts to manipulate time, dawn arrives later than it would or should — at least according to the clock, the way the outside world reckons the hours and minutes. And for me, it has always been in the indigo hours, those just before the sunrise, when my dreams are at their most vivid.
Memory, individual and ancestral; present and presence, in differing contexts; prophecy and thresholds into world deeper and farther than our waking selves can conceive. These are the dreams of a darker dawn, days begun beneath the canopy of silvering stars in a violet sky.
Emergence from the deep cold of winter is supposed to focus our senses firmly on the light, or so we’re told. And there’s no denying the attractiveness of longer days and warmer winds. But the night has its own distinctive beauty, and I refuse to fear the dark.
Last night, we ventured outdoors well after full dark. The sky was a vast black vault, a seemingly endless void, simultaneously without depth and with so much depth that one could be lost in it just by looking. But the blackness was not unrelieved: The stars have begun to show themselves as they do in summer, not stark and cold and distant but seemingly lower, closer, bright shimmering orbs of friendly light. They transform the terrifying opacity of the night skies into something warm and welcoming, a blanket rather than a black hole.
We saw no shooting stars, no motion of satellites organic or synthetic, but the heavens seemed alive with the movement of the spirits, all the same. Constellations are living things, in our way, but then, our entire universe is animated by spirit. Perhaps it’s no surprise, and no accident either, that our greatest wisdom is given to those chosen to bear it in the darker hours, through the distant diffuse glow of dreams and visions, like so many stars traveling across the sky.
Tonight, Father Sun will descend to his rest just those few moments later than he did on the evening just past; he will rise again tomorrow a bit later, as well. If the forecast holds, he may conceal himself behind a veil of clouds, but we will know his presence by the absence of the dark. But in the intervening hours, when the sky turns crimson, then violent, then cobalt, and finally, jet, it will be time once again to open ourselves and our spirits to the worlds beyond our sight.
It will be time for dreams.
~ Aji
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