Comments on: All this time

By: kasturi

kasturi — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:02:40 +0000

I loved your search for the clearing in the form of shinto shrines. i can relate to that, dave.

kas

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:10:01 +0000

Yes, exactly! In a virtually elfin forest, too. And it remained elusive because some other S.O.B. had already pitched a tent in it both times.

By: quiet regular

quiet regular — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:17:54 +0000

remember that enclosed dark clearing at Dolly Sods?

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:52:02 +0000

I think you’re right: my dream and Maria’s do seem like analogues. Forest spaces have merged with rooms in my imagination ever since we moved here when I was five, if not earlier. My brothers and I all had dreams, prompted by train whistles in the night, in which we were chased by trains up the hollow (we had to cross the train tracks every day on our way home from school), and the hollow frequently turned into the narrow, L-shaped staircase to our bedrooms.

I’ll bet just about everyone who grew up during the Cold War had desolation dreams like that. Maybe the post-1989 generation does too, though, I don’t know. We certainly don’t lack for terrors today. In fact, we seem to thrive on them.

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:46:15 +0000

Thanks, Peter. It’s interesting that you made a connection between Zen and that Z. I never would’ve thought of that.

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:42:17 +0000

Oh. I’d be interested to hear what the foresters claimed the pines were infected with. Often the effect of native pests and diseases is benign if viewed from an ecological perspective, but foresters like to think they can do a better job of thinning trees than nature.

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:40:21 +0000

Do the roots imagine their phantom limbs, and weep because the wind can no longer move them?

Thanks for giving me something to think about too.

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:39:17 +0000

The irony is that I already lived, and still live, pretty far out in the woods, though there’s a large meadow in back of the houses too, too. Whatever house I’m in is never small enough, nor the forest big and wild enough. I was always envious of the protagonist of the young-adult novel My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craghead George, for running away from home and moving into a huge hollow tree. (I actually know a guy who lived in a hollow redwood stump in northern California for a while.)

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:35:03 +0000

Hi Michelle – Thanks again for your comments at the Festival of the Trees blog.

By: Joan

Joan — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 06:36:39 +0000

Wow! What a story, and how Jungian! I wonder if this is an archetypal dream we all have in some form or another. I like Maria have wish fulfillment dreams of houses with secret luxurious rooms, each one more fascinating than the previous one. Your Shangri La valley woodsy dream would correspond if one lived one’s life in a more expansive and green environment.

The then there is the dysphoric dream. In my case, it is of vacant bombed out concrete high rises in‘ another part of Hannibal, that keeps reoccurring in various guises. It could have been memory whiffs of the old Hannibal Limekilns, mixed with WWII movie newsreels of European devastation. Whatever. Desolation is desolation, whether is desolation by bombs or what was referred to as “The Termite People” in that old movie “Emerald Forest” with Powers Booth.