I had been there so many times in my imagination that it seemed like a memory. I had been there through the stories I read and movies I had seen. I must have traveled there in my dreams too. I must have traveled there when my sleep was so deep that my soul took a journey. I must have traveled there because I remembered the way it felt. I remembered the fresh smell of the air with a shot of cold crispness. I remembered a sky so blue with white wisps of clouds. I remembered that it was bluer than any blue and whiter than any white that I had ever seen before. It was almost the same color blue as a pair of eyes where I once drowned. I remembered the dark grey clouds that cried cold, cold drops of rain.
I remembered the river. It didn’t flow up to the banks but had pools and eddies and sand bars. I remembered the green, like the color of moss, reflected in the water of the river. I remembered the trees-birch I think. There were row after row, lined up in perfect lines along the river. They expanded out through the city, nestled among the houses and buildings and roadways. I remembered yellow leaves and white bark coloring the trees, which colored the landscape as far as the eye could see.
I remembered the Spirit of the place. It was light like a bird- like an eagle. It had white feathers that covered the space between the molecules of air to make the air lighter. The air was not dark and heavy, causing labored breathing, like other places. This air was so light, it filled every space in my lungs and infused my body with its lightness, in every breathe.
There was mystery in the Spirit . It was a mystery like so many stories to be told. They were stories I had heard in another time,- in another place where the Eternal separates Time and Space. The stories were filled with emotion. The emotion was love. I remembered the love calling me, connecting me, drawing me, remembering me.
In the quietness of my room, I heard the rain. It dripped through trees that were growing so tightly together, it seemed the drops could never find the ground. They passed from leaf to leaf to leaf, downward to the leaf covered earth. I remembered the sound of those raindrops. They were lighter than raindrops in other places in the same way the air was lighter than other places. The feathers of the Spirit connected the raindrops the way it connected the air molecules. There was comfort in the sound of the raindrops and the echo of a whisper .”Love”, it said. There was no loneliness in this place. The Spirit filled the air and the raindrops. The Spirit connected them to the leaves and the trees and to me. I am one with the Spirit and the air, the yellow and white trees, the moss-green river, the blue sky, the white wispy clouds and the dark grey ones. I am not alone. I am complete in the Spirit of this place. I am home.
cindybiondigobrecht 