They were young and poor and much in love, and what they lacked in material things, they accounted for in dreams and lived affections so that—in their poverty of things—they lived perhaps more richly than those that seem to have it all.
To escape into dreams—to travel as they called it—they walked together the four block crossings and one right turn where the city library waited, an escape for all who lent their spirits to its offerings. In a corner easily forgotten, and easily lost, they sat and sometimes lain on sofa, turning through pages of old National Geographics, imagining places they’d never known but dreamed someday they would see.
At night, on the ground floor of a neighborhood where doors stayed locked, even when at home, they slept with the window drawn so that world of life would not impede upon their dreams. With window drawn, they could be anywhere, and anything, and so at night, in the intimacy of spirits and presence, they became together wholly in their dream.
Through their years, as material prosperity came to catch with that of spirit and dream, travel still called to her, drawing her away and into dreams of distant lands; and where her spirit dreamed, so too directed his.
They saw the world, less as tourists and more as present souls lost in lands and lives that existed around them. They immersed themselves into moments, complimenting travelers, not demanding consumer, of place, people, and experiences found.
And no matter the wealth or distance of their travels, they never forgot the beginning, their dreams and affections and sofa readings, manifestations of experience waiting there to live.
She thought of it all as she stared on veranda looking out over landscape she had never known, and would likely never see again; a land and scene of ancient cultivation that, in spite of man’s presence, maintained its spirit of wild and natural wonder.
Sky burned over terraced steps of hillside, each fall catching and bearing pocket of growing grain from shallow flooded roots. A landscape entirely made my man, but where even knowing such, man continued to seem so small: a worker with, and not against the ways and means of nature.
Sky filled with sounds of birds in flight and far away on distant limbs. Songs and calls, unknown, but sounded still with spirit of known home, place of rest and peace, and as she walked across veranda, she became one in nature and world, free and true and natural before immersing into waters of overseeing bath.
Its warmth soothed, invited drifting of mind into dream and contemplation, as sky kept fire, tempering richer in its flames before cool and dark of night smothered the flame and opened Heaven to universe to stars.
She stayed in the immersion, weight of hair soft upon its roots as its strands moved from float, to saturated sink into bath and water’s cradling.
As she rested, she wrote a story in her mind, one she would write—someday. She thought of a story from Somerset Maugham, of a man who found enlightenment on the dawn of a birthday staring over a south Asian sky, and she wondered, too, if such a moment lived within her as she existed beneath sun’s set and heaven’s changing view.
She knew, too, that he was near; and without him, dream would not be complete.
It was perfect, wondrous; and she thought no more on meaning of the moment but immersed herself into existence as it lived.
Transcendence in cradle of living world beneath universe of immensity and light.
In night, they lain in open view of all the world, no window needing drawn, no window at all—alive and immersed in living dream—transcendence in cradle of living world beneath universe of immensity and light.