Anam Cara

The Belonging of the Earth

In the beginning was the dream. In the eternal night where no dawn broke, the dream deepened. Before anything ever was, it had to be dreamed. Everything had its beginning in possibility. Every single thing is somehow the expression and incarnation of a thought. If a thing had never been thought, it could never be. If we take Nature as the great artist of longing then all presences in the world have emerged from her mind and imagination. We are children of the earth’s dreaming. When you compare the silent, under-night of Nature with the detached and intimate intensity of the person, it is almost as if Nature is in dream and we are her children who have broken through the dawn into time and place. Fashioned in the dreaming of the clay, we are always somehow haunted by that; we are unable ever finally to decide what is dream and what is reality. Each day we live in what we call reality. Yet the more we think about it, the more life seems to resemble a dream. We rush through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. We worry and grow anxious; we magnify trivia until they become important enough to control our lives. Yet all the time, we have forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos. There is no protective zone around any of us. Anything can happen to anyone at any time. There is no definitive dividing line between reality and dream. What we consider real is often precariously dreamlike. One of the linguistic philosophers said that there is no evidence that could be employed to disprove this claim: The world only came into existence ten minutes ago complete with all our memories. Any evidence you could proffer could still be accounted for by the claim. Because our grip on reality is tenuous, every heart is infused with the dream of belonging.