Stone Dreams

I close my eyes.

Inhale.

The freshness is intoxicating.  Trapped, and alive, within me.

I open my eyes to a different world.  One I imagine and live in whenever I need it.  Or whenever it finds its way to my thoughts to surprise me with the joy of it.

I open my eyes only to my imagination.

And when I open them there, I am standing outside.  The breeze is blowing.  The sky is blue.  The clouds are enormous white mountains of fluff.  It’s not hot.  I walk from the spot in the tall and waving dark green grasses to another spot.  Just because each spot is minutely different but equally amazing.

I stare at the stone cottage.  Because it’s perfect.  It’s at once cool and warm in my vision.  On a hot day I can go in to be cool, on a cold day I can go in to be safe and warm.  It’s a vision of home and comfort and the center of my physical space.

I look past the cottage to stare at the ocean.  We are well above and far behind the shore line.  “Far” being relative when the island is only three miles wide at it’s broadest point.  I never knew the meaning of power and strength and safety, like I did, when I first stepped on to the pier and then the stone, of this place.  Solid.  I discovered solid.

The grey stone.  It’s everywhere.  There isn’t enough of it to suit me.

I walk to the cottage.  Because here, in my imagination, it belongs to me.

But more importantly, I, belong to it.

The top half of the door was already open.  Leaning lazily against the inside.  I open the bottom half of the door and step in.  It takes two steps to walk through the depth of the wall.  The flagstone floor is cool and scrubbed clean.  The walls whitewashed.  Simple.  Because they don’t need much.  The massive fireplace with it’s arched opening – I could easily stand in.  The room beckoned to be filled with people talking, or singing, or working at their crafts.  Casually, without stress.  My craft may change daily, but there was no place better to start a craft, then in this room.  The cottage was originally built with an alcove built into the wall for a bed.  So the sleepers would remain warm in the room with the fireplace.  I kept it just as it was.  Because it needed to be there, it belonged just as it was intended for this home.  And truth be told, I preferred sleeping there to any of the bedrooms that had been built on.

The rest of the cottage was just as I needed it.  A large kitchen with an old fashioned, and real, truly old, cupboard with dishes and wares as I need them.  An old stove.   A massive wooden table that I could sit at with a cup of tea.  Or sit at with twelve other people.  Feeling comfortable at its size whether I’m alone or not.  Being pragmatic I also have the common luxuries of our times.   Refrigerator, microwave, internet.  Bathrooms.   This life, in this cottage though, entices me to do more without those luxuries.  But I have them, and I do use them.

All of the rooms were white.  With deep set windows.  The walls of the house being near two feet thick.  It’s structure making me feel quite at ease.  The thickness, the solidness, the strength, it all felt familiar and necessary.

I can see every room, every nook, perfectly.

So I sigh.

I open all of the windows so the breeze blows freely through every room.

I walk out of the kitchen door, also a dutch door, and out to the garden.  I keep walking.  There are paths that I know have been walked for hundreds of years.  They lead to neighbors.  To caves.  To cliffs.  To hidden spots and wonder filled spots.  They take me where ever I let them.  I can climb the stone walls.  Or walk up hills.

There is one walk I take.  No path to lead the way.  It is all stone and carved by a hand greater than mine.  It leads to a place.  The one place I think of most.  The one place I climb to be closer to something I can’t name.  Something I can’t describe.  But it’s there that I go when I need to be …. in that perfect spot in that perfect moment with the air as perfect as God’s own breath.

I go there.

And stand.

Perfectly still.

And breathe.

It is here that I have trapped the essence of this dream.

It is here where I breathe to energize my soul.

It is here where my eyes are most open.

Even when they are closed.