By Rajmund Dabrowski
I was catapulted into this piece after a daydream during some unexpected cold weather that kept me inside. My deep connection with nature and enchantment with the seasons that unveil nature’s beauty were the inspiration.
I imagined a permanent year morphing all four seasons into each other.
What if the purple lavender of summer in Provence seamlessly shared the colors and the scent of the purple autumn bell heathers in Hampshire’s heathlands in England? Being born in the month of September, it’s the heathers that appeal most to my senses.
Then, my daydream morphed to the colors of golden autumn trees in Poland, Canada, and New England, as they give themselves up for the wintery whiteness and abundance of snow in front of our house in Maryland.
Soon the snow would join the warming sunrays of spring, with an array of green hope covering the flora.
Such daydreaming is my reaction to what many of us experience as a loss of what once was predictable—the golden past. Instead, the predictability of global warming, and with it the decaying nature of our Mother Earth.
In A Movable Feast, Ernest Hemingway describes the sadness “of losing a season out of your life” when unseasonal changes in the weather destroy the expected warmth of spring. “When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally; but it was frightening that it had nearly failed,” he wrote, reflecting on his Paris days in the 1920s.
As I recall the “good old days” of my distant past, gone are the farmers gazing at the evening sky and knowing for certain what would come in the morning.
We are left with a daydream.
Then came an actual dream. While I daydream in full color, my night dreams are checkered with some color, but all too often consist of black-and-white scenes. This includes scary nightmares with vivid experiences of fear. I’m always running in those bouts of night-imagination.
This time, I saw images of heaven. The images were inspired by Scriptural narratives. Whether I was there, or not I cannot tell for certain. What I saw etched itself in my memory to be recalled again and again.
An uncounted multitude walked on heavenly boulevards. Everything was bathed in sunshine and formed a palette of rainbow colors.
On closer scrutiny, I recognized some faces. Ha! I heard myself utter. Did they deserve to be there? I mused. I would not have expected to see some of them enjoying this celestial bliss.
Oh, really?
Upon reflection, it became clear that not all is as simple and true in life as we assume or conclude.
Whether you dream at night or daydream in the afternoon about a better reality, all you can do is look after your own rights or wrongs. The rest—everything else, actually—belongs to the Life Giver.
Rajmund Dabrowski is RMC communication director and editor of Mountain Views.