WALKING ON THIN ICE

Lewisham sidewalk, London

Last week Smith dreamt his watch hands fell off and stuck on the six. He told me the dream when he woke up.

That afternoon, we went to a store to buy locks and get keys cut. He pulled the watch out of his pocket, and we heard a clink noise. He turned the watch over in the palm of his hand. The back was missing. He looked at the front. The second hand had fallen off, was stuck at the nine.

Smith said, “I told you about this this morning. You heard it. You’re my witness.”

“I think reality is telling us something,” I said. “We’re buying locks for our bikes and for our hotel room in Morocco. We feel this need to be more secure. But as soon as we get one thing fixed, reality says, Nope. You can’t have too much of a grasp on this. And destroys your watch. I guess we’re not supposed to keep track of time.”

Last summer, I took a picture of a spatter on a sidewalk in our neighborhood in London. It looked like a tortured ghost.

A day later, Smith’s ex-girlfriend visited him in a dream. It was bad and they fought. Masumi (the girlfriend) said, “You’ll never find happiness without me. I’m the best.”

Another woman was in the dream, a sweet brown-skinned girl. Smith thinks the girl represented me. He cuddled and kissed her, but Masumi chased her away.

He came down the stairs in the morning, crying. He told me about the dream. And he was crying because his mom — Mother Dwarf — was in it as well. Her ghost manifested and then disappeared, leaving a Mother Dwarf shaped hole in the wall.

Smith found the dream so interesting that he blogged it. Later that day, Amy Sparks read his blog, and informed him about the terrible murder of Masumi. Smith thought it strange, because he never dreams about her. Their relationship was over 20 years ago. But her spirit passed through on the way out, decided to visit him.

This is some writing from a recent walk of ours:

As though reading my mind, Smith stops to touch the dirt walls which line one side of the road. “It’s soft,” he says. “Just look at that root.” He traces its path, which is open to us because of erosion in the wall.

The exposed roots make me think of mangroves.

“Follow the root down,” he says. “It goes down and into the root of another tree. That reminds me. The largest life form on this planet is one plant. All the roots are connected. People think it’s a forest, but it’s just one plant.”

“Can’t see the tree for the forest,” I say. “If you google you could use just a couple words: largest, life form, and root. We could find more information about that plant.”

There is meaning and interconnection in the universe. When we cut ourselves off from it, we can’t see it. But when we slow down and live more in harmony with nature — when we examine our dreams — we can take its pulse.