There you go with the love song again, mermaids singing, pillows and peaches, some unfulfilled wallowing in a vicarious life. I watched geese with their horned bills and new sping plumage, crested curved necks, wide wedge wings, male and female and downy goslings. Two ganders charged eachother in the millrace pond, smashed chest to chest and neck to neck, grappling and frothing the water white and roaring and kicking, wings beating hard. One lost balance and was dunked beneath the water, and turned tail for a loud honking flight across the pond.

The victorious gander turned and then grabbed the goose by the back of her neck and held her down beneath his wings there in the water, necks both arced away from the beat of his tawny wings and fanned tail. Then they keeled to the side like a sailboat in a strong wind before he slid off her and trumpeted his victory and prize. Life is in the strife and clutching and honking. It's over quick.

I had a dream and it was the biggest dream. It was a terrifying dream, of strategy and battle and the worship of gods other people believe in, and those things we do not even guess are gods but some people worship them, and then there was the One for whom we have no name. A worldwide battle raged and Jesus and Buddha bided their time with a game of checkers.

I believe there is no God but God but what does that mean to anyone else? I can only humbly guess what I know and or what it means to me. My dream worried me about understanding anything. Interpretation of things we do not know is like balancing on a barbed wire fence. We seek to know what lies beyond the Sphinx riddle, the end of life, and in craning our necks we risk losing our balance. I believe there is a path to follow, for love and peace and freedom and truth, and therein lies paradise.

And in my dream the grey heavens crashed and opened and vast armies marched across a scorched red dying land, shapes shifted, rules broke, prophecy rang true again but not the way anyone ever anticipates.

What do you believe? There is the crux of it, the base, the machinery. What do you believe and what do you want? I catch myself sometimes thinking things I don't want, small little needful prideful things secondary to my life, tertiary to my soul. Not necessarily things, per se, but the thing about things, the direct object of a notion, the would-be havenots and whatnots and whatever I don't know. I know the earth is spherical. Would that the world were round. Gaia is not Cosmos.

Sometimes the dreams I have leave me slowly, and I increasingly become aware that I have one leg bent at the knee tenting the blankets, the other leg stretched out under the covers with toes pointing at the dark, my eyes opened and I can't remember when the dream stopped or when I awoke or when I came back to myself and faded to consciousness. Do you know that feeling, the rise to surface? The way pressure increases in the chest and the body settles with a weight as if the soul returns from some far voyage.

The room is black but far from still, with a cat and man and four plants breathing, a fishtank humming and burbling, a fan generating white noise to deaden the noise of a maybe train or airplane or skein of honking geese in passage. But I can still hear my heart, that constant simple rhythm slowed in half sleep.

Other nights I awake with a shudder and shake, my heart a drunken grasshopper trapped in my chest, startled at my own surprise to find a dream wrenched from the riddle's answer. The dream is like a rough clear carnelian agate cast from the sea, sharp edges, roughened by sand and tumbled with other rocks. I have found no way to return to a dream, although I sometimes try. Last night I did not try, but kept the glimpse I think I saw, interpreted it as I think I can. Perhaps someday I will seek to polish the rough stone into a cabochon so smooth it reflects the world.