Day 5 – The Visitation

I dreamt that my father came to visit me and wanted me to take care of
him in his final days here.

He didn’t seem, to me,
to be particularly close to dying,

but what do I know about such things?

We were back at out house in Tillsonburg,
not in the house as it was (it is no longer there),
but outside in the garden, and
under the trees on the lawn.

There was one particlularly beautiful cherry tree,
that bloomed wonderfully white blosoms every year,
showering them down on us with the breezes.

Finally, it stood surrounded by drifts of white confetti,
which I could scoop up with my hands.

I thought of saving them in jars under the bed,
like I had once, as a child,
captured a whole bunch of newly hatched preying mantises.

( That experiement hadn’t ended well, as I recall.)

These petals were delicately veined pieces of gossamer – like fibre :

angel’s wings or perhaps fairies’ skirts?

They didn’t seem meant to survive for long,
but had a brief transience about them.
Melting into yellowed curls within a few days, into the lawn grass under
the tree, was their destined path.

I wanted to arrest the moment of their splendor
indefinitely,
but, like capturing soap bubbles drifting on gentle breezes, it was
incomprehensibly fragile.

The moment could not be arrested from it’s relentless forward march and
movement.

So too, now, is the life of my father.
Robed in a physically old body, I connect, in dream,
with the brightness and love shining from
him, himself.

“Care for me, ” he seems to say. “I wish to return, to the all encompassing warmth of the nurture of my mother.”
Back to the beginning.
A reversal of time.
Or a starting over…?

I wanted to hang on to him.
To arrest the moment in time from moving forward in it’s predestined
decay.
But realized
it could only be perceived
and dimly perhaps,

understood.

The gentle relentlessness of it made me want to scream.

Soon,
like sparkling soap bubbles,
the moment will burst open, with a (ting) wet splash,
freeing
that which they once contained inside them.

Gossamer fairies’ skirts,
returning to the earth.

It was a visitation.