Once upon a…

Once upon a Nevermore, there lived a Dreaming, a marvelous topsy-turvy multiverse where things as they were were never the same. each time we opened our eyes the dreams always offer us waterbrushes to dab into the Ordinary, with our simple command to not only collect the Tears of Saudade & Sorrow for our easel but to paint with the faraway scents & elusive colors of the Oceans & the Stars.

thus as a Merman i seem to be fleeing the drowning Atlantis of my sadness & struggles, for here have i fetched up upon these burning oxygen-saturated shores of volcanic Oregon, sent swimming like a Sea Monkey underseas in these ordinary worlds to simply see what can be scenes of Spring billowing colors from a grey-green aquarium in a neighborhood not normally known for the watercolors of the surreal, yet imbued with…fairy houses, talking snails, and infinity held inside a petal

amidst fanciful rocks and bioswale landscapes, the Merman bubbles past in his Bathysphere, delving into the streets on his slowly moving diving bell cycle, borrowed from the pages of history from Mr Eads, who dared to walk the bottom of the churning Mississippi River salvaging wrecks from the Steamboat Era. Can we salvage the wreckage of our modern ordinary lives, realizing these humdrum Homes are more than real estate! We carry landscapes inside of our surreal vanishing world where a Merman meets a seahorse disguised as a snail peeking from this suburban coral reef of cars, craftsman homes, and fractured breathing in an uneasy world too tired to slumber as the waters rise, nipping at our heels if we fail to pick up our paintbrushes dabbed in the Ordinary? Can a photo of a fairy house launch a thousand Fables, all leading to the morale, “and then we saved the day for seahorses & snails!?”

“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood!” grins Mr Rogers, “won’t you walk with me?”

after an injury where walking is nothing to be taken for granted, i emerge as my own strange harbinger. of what do I signify, whether a blessing or omen, well, there is no knowing the cryptic tea leaves of tomorrow, so today i exercise & read & imagine an elusive world of my future, a harbinger struggling to walk. Won’t you walk with me, careful of my tether to this Bathysphere, as we see what scenes of Spring greet us?

there are distinct advantages to going slowly in a zooming world, to taking nothing for granted. i walk with my 7 yr old niece, who has lived on this street all her life. she wrangles the cords of my Bathysphere with ease as we slowly move in a torpor of misty Oregon grey that is giving way to the green tenacity held by shocking lichens and furry moss, a tenacity i admire more than words can say…

we come across various shelters for a page of poetry, a common blessing that these surreal streets are alive with the Dreaming, even if one features some famous doggerel from TS Eliot about “April is the cruelest month…” so without a care for wanton verses made by mice nor men we carry on with our navigations. we ask a snail where we are, greeted by “Home is where we reel our Dreams back to the safety of our Heart,” and so it goes…the snail/seahorse directs us to the Mary Oliver poem nearby, which we listen to her words like a seashell whispering the infinite roars of the Ocean, bow with blessings the poet bestowed upon the Sun and like stowaways on a voyage we feel reckless not wrecked, and so forth…and so on…and so it goes…a stroll in the neighborhood so slow that a poem can be made from our jaunty shuffle in slow motion through these coral reefs pretending to be houses wavering beneath the blazing Sun in a Sea of the Ordinary…

Let yourself be baffled & glorified by these blossoms & the strangeness of the beauty of it all, for these Spring scenes from the Bathysphere of a Merman, dreaming of jimi hendrix today as we climb deeper into Love & away from the shocking cruelty of the shooting shouting sure-of-themselves Sandmen of Time who erase our dreams with the daily news, religious fervor & the terrible instruments of tortured phrases. They sweep up the broken pieces of yesterday with what’s left of your forgetfulness to care. Dive deeper, my friends; learn to breathe underseas in your dreams…to trust the harbors you keep as a harbinger for all tomorrow’s Dreamings…