Look, but don’t hope to find
I’ve received my wish, and Spring arrives with its arms full of tiny blossoms and warmer winds. Life starts over. Another year, turn turn again. Maybe I’m becoming jaded in other arenas, but to this time I still am a child with a delirious grin pasted over my face, while jouncing downhill from work – blue sky above, golden sunset streaking my last-minute skin, thoughts of home and the approaching weekend playing double-dare with birdsong in the trees overhead.
God, I get fiercely happy just thinking and remembering, waiting for more. I don’t ever want to become too old to understand this time of year.
Having just finished watching “Princess Mononoke” for the umpteenth time, I can honestly say – I will never try to understand the minds of men or wolves. But I wholly empathize with the kodama.
I dreamt of the jungle temple again a couple of weeks ago, for the first time in years. A recurring place known to me since childhood, but I could never pinpoint it on a map. It always rises, tall and sand-coloured like a pyramid, in the heart of a trackless forest. In the dream, I climb and never reach the top, but stop often along the way; sometimes perched on a ledge outside, overlooking the trees that froth and huddle to beyond the horizon; sometimes inside, in one of many wide, low-roofed and cool-shaded rooms that are not unlike indoor carparks. I rarely meet anyone else, though once I recall finding a room full of cacti and other exotic plants; another time, it was a room full of snakes that had to be negotiated.
I’d like to one day find out where this temple is in significance to my mindset; why it’s been appearing in my dreams since I first started dreaming. Most of all, I’d like to see the jungle from the temple’s very top.
celenagaia 