Yesterday�s chandelier-hanging was postponed until this afternoon, so I didn�t leave the house after all, except for a brief foray with a flashlight into the yard after AJ went to bed. It was cold and still smelled like snow, although the clouds were quickly departing. A little smoke still hung in the air from our neighbor�s brush bonfire earlier in the day. Blindly wandering in the dark, I nearly ran headlong into a pair of white-tailed deer who had been calmly dining on our lawn. They froze for an instant, then took off at top speed down the icy stream bed, disappearing into the woods. It was kind of ethereal.

AJ was coughing a lot last night, which meant I slept rather lightly and resulted in some bizarre dreams. In one, I was living in a Chicago-style bungalow. I was home alone when an airplane, descending to land at a nearby airport too soon, ran into the side of my house. The damage was not as bad as one might have thought and the airplane continued flying. But it was unsettling. My friends were trying to convince me to sue the airport for their error. Then I could either fix the house or buy and new one and still have plenty left over. But I was unwilling to do that, as I didn�t think I really needed it.

Another dream was much more meditative. I was skating down a river. That was pretty much it, actually. The whole dream was about gliding and seeing snapshots of activity along the river banks: grazing cows, a family walking their dog, activity in a kitchen viewed through the window of a passing house. I woke feeling peaceful and calm.

Where I went to college, there was a large pond in the center of campus made by the damming of a small river. In the winter, the pond and much of the river froze and you could skate on it. The pond was cleared for skating, but I often took off down the river. It flowed through the woods and wound through little towns. Where the tree limbs overhung the river and in rockier portions, the skating was treacherous, but it was totally worth the challenge. You could skate for miles and never see another soul. It was magical, like falling into a fairy tale, especially when the trees were hung with icicles.

There have been a few moments in my life where time has stopped to offer a glimpse of incredible beauty. Not just beauty in the aesthetic sense, but beauty somehow charged with emotion so that you feel you�ve managed to see something that is quite beyond your experience, beyond your ability to know and understand it. A couple early mornings skating on the river were like that. Solo winter trips (via bicycle) to the rocky beach in the New England town where I grew up provided other moments. The most startling one of all, though, was while bicycling in Ireland. The day was grey and misty. I had left Galway City about 5 or 6 hours before. Populated land gradually fell away, leaving in its place fields of peat and stone cottages being so dilapidated and overgrown as to appear to have been reclaimed by the earth as its own. The sun was beginning to descend and I was pedaling fast to cross the peat marshes before nightfall, when suddenly the road took a bend and I found myself overlooking a blue pond surrounded by miles of green marsh, from which the occasional thread of peat smoke went twisting toward the sky. In the distance, the 12 Bens, ancient mountains shrouded in mist, suddenly appeared. The picture was so arresting, that I stopped and as I watched, a shaft of sunlight shot out of the clouds, illuminating the pond and causing a flock of white swans to rise up and disappear into the mountains� mist. The light, the colors, the swans � it felt very symbolic, mythic, primal. It actually made me cry. For some reason it brought to mind the haunting tune of a Gregorian chant, "Ave maris stella.� To this day that chant brings tears to my eyes (although not in the rhythmically oblivious form found in the MIDI file at the above link) for its connection to that moment when I felt changed by the world around me.

As I write of this, I am realizing that all of these moments also included some kind of physical exertion � in these cases, skating and cycling. I�m sure these experiences were intensified by my kinesthetic sense of my surroundings, of my ability to move through them under my own power. Such experiences provide a simultaneous sense of personal strength, and complete weakness and insignificance. In the moment, you feel things have been put into proper perspective, although I�m not sure if I could tell you exactly how. Perhaps that is why they occasionally reappear in dreams.

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