The mound of crepes with spinach and cheese sauce is in the oven. The first few crepes were a little funny looking, but by the end, they were looking good, albeit not at all resembling a shape you could call round. I didn’t do everything the way Julia taught how to do it, but the sauces were delicious going in, so we’re watching the oven door and the clock pretty closely.
Yesterday we drove into Columbus to deliver pots. It was the first real snow of the season and we woke to the wonder of the enchanting beauty of a freshly blanketed landscape. The air was as crisp and cool as an iced glass of water on a hot, thirst-swollen tongue. A soft haze from the gentle snowfall filtered the whitened landscape, washed with yellows and greens from the grasses poking through the blanket and with the charcoal grey of sagebrush, trees, rocks and shrubbery in the distance, creating an image as illusory as a painting.
As we ripped along the highway returning home, the snow seemed to be flowing past us in a fierce wind, blowing and snowing with the force of a blizzard that made us shiver to see it when, in reality, the snow was falling with a rare gentleness, piling light upon the fence posts and wires.
How strange that our personal perspectives, seen through the filters of our experiences and built upon the base of a belief system, can paint life so extremely different than reality.
I have a related set of recurring dreams that just this week I began to understand. In the dreams I’m either wandering out of a church and cannot find my car, or I’m rushing through a shopping mall full of meandering people and I’m searching for Ben. I’m not actually lost, but I cannot find my way home. A third type of dream I have is that I’m at an airport with a group of friends or relatives, but we cannot all get on the same plane. Sometimes I’m on a plane with only one or two people I know, but usually I must fly alone on a very small plane that I have to board by climbing a long spiral staircase.
Writing these dreams down makes the meaning seem obvious now, but I woke Friday morning after such a dream and as I was drinking my first cup of coffee beside the wood stove I had a sense that I’m blundering through life in a filtering fog that leaves me blind to anything beyond my immediate surroundings and, so, cannot see which way to go. The problem, of course is that we humans are not gifted with sight that allows us to see more than our immediate lives. We have the media to show us what exists ‘out there,’ but we’re so caught up in our own immediacy that we cannot recognize anyone else’s perspective as legitimate.
What I want, then, is to learn how to see beyond my own blindness. This is not a goal or a project like the others I’m working on, because I don’t know how to go about it. But, then, if I don’t make it a goal or a project, how can it ever come to be? Perhaps it will have to be some sort of exploration through writing.
I’ll have to explore this further.
The crepe mound just came out of the oven, so I’m of to satiate my baser needs for the moment.
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