Desire is the creator. Desire is the destroyer. — Hari Dass Baba
After weeks of static dark I dream an immense mountain. Below it in the valley: red tents and tattered flags, holy carnival leftovers. Others are with me in front of it and this matters but we don’t yet know why. The journey is already chosen. A hard wind lifts the colors skyward. Fabric flashes over the mountain as we descend together to gather the animals. We make our way towards them: the goats locked inside the rocky walls.
They are restless and scream like humans.
I am trying to explain what this means as we walk across downtown to get coffee and juice. I am reading everything in the process of deciphering. Mountains are associated with revelation and transition. They are ancient places where sacred messages are handed down, where the wise one talks to god and is transformed. My friend doesn’t understand and neither yet do I.
The message lays tattered in my mind.
I tell her how in the dream but also somehow beyond the dream, the landscape remains unchanged. Mythical and monolithic, the mountain is self-evident. It is us who suffer. I say maybe it is this we are here to witness: our movements around its bulk.
Standing in the white-tiled line of the local juicery I remember it all: each conversation leading…
