a dream

i have just had a dream. not of my usual sort by any means. i do not have dreams like this one. i rarely dream, and when i do the nits that remain with me upon waking are hazy. foggy. indeterminate. on the rare occasions when i remember anything with any clarity it is usually of the brain dump sort - like when a computer's hard drive that has become overfull and various unrelated files must be purged. these clear dreams are like that recycle bin: a twisted and jumbled nonsensical mess. but not tonight. tonight there was connection. and tonight i was not fully asleep. tonight i had a waking dream which i can remember as though it were happening to me now.

i am alone, on a pilgrimage of a sort. i do not know exactly why, beyond that i have dreamed for years of coming here, but i am come to lumbini in nepal. birthplace of siddhartha gautama, he would become the buddha. i am not here religiously, at least not in the strictest meaning. i am not here to find myself. i am not here for enlightenment, i am not here to worship. yet i am here all the same.

i have come at a good time. the hills are full, the bodhi tree connected fully to surrounding landscape with cords that bear countless prayer flags. their colors are myriad, their shapes shift and play like the dancers i left in the clubs of kathmandu. there is a difference, and yet a sameness - while their reason for being here is so separate from those dancers, their nature is so very much the same: dissolution, oneness, connection, celebration, impermanence. i feel the colors physically, shocking me against a sky as blue as any i have ever seen, lush grasses and tree-lines hills thrusting their greens up into the blues almost as if to make the reds and yellows and oranges of the flags all the more wondrous.

this is a holy place, someplace i can touch without touching. there is something special here. moreso than just another simple place of worship. i am a white face here, a kind that is not seen terribly infrequently but seemingly greeted with some understandable measure of doubt as to the honesty of the visit. the faces i see are brown, lovely reddish and yellows and weathered to a point not often experienced in our cities. i am of little concern to the faces, white face or no. i am but another part of the landscape, another warp or weft in reality's fabric for this moment. this is an altogether novel experience for me; i am not being viewed with indifference, but with recognition and a lack of concern. i am not being overlooked, i am being seen with eyes that understand that my presence has little bearing on their experience but must be honored all the same.

i come to the tree. not a tree, but *the* tree. this is the focal point, the reason they are here. i can feel this too. the colors come rushing to me suddenly, the songs and breaths and breezes and prayers descending as i descend to my knees to pay some respect to this place. i have no plans nor expectations of anything momentous, not even of anything special at all. but as i come to my knees i can feel something crack inside of me, moses rock smacked with his staff and flowing blood and water in the depths of whatever it is that is me. this is a beautiful sound to me, and peaceful and quietly thunderous roar, and a new softness grows wildly from a strange spot in the middle of me.

and then it comes. a single, beautiful tear. there is no outpouring, no deluge. one small tear, which wends its way to my eye and finds itself balanced at the base of my nose. and it falls. i see it drop, each inch traveled toward the ground a lifetime. and when it finds the soil, it simply disappears into it with no apparent effect.

but i hear another drop hit. it is not my tear. i hear another. others have joined me in my small outpouring. the tears begin to come together in a pattering, quietly enough to be unmistakable for what they are but still loud enough to be heard. and then comes a larger drop. and another. these are not tears of the congregants. this is rain, the cool and bracing kind. the kind that is mostly unseen here.

our tears gather together with the coming rain and soon the skies have opened in a torrent to join with our own crying, and i rear back on my knees, fingers buried in the soil at my knees and i wail. for the first time in years i wail, and the whole of nature wails alongside me. the ground around smells of life and ashes, the winds of beginnings and ends, and i am with them and of them.

we wait, and we cry. and the clouds open apart and there comes a sunshine the warming likes of which i have never seen. from the spot where my first tear touched grows a shoot of purest green. i raise myself to my feet, gather my senses and turn to leave. i do not need to see this flower. it is enough to know that it grows.