On the round-about drive to drop off these or those people in Xtian's mini-van, I got to thinking. Well, feeling, really. Some of my fondest memories are driving around in the early morning hours--sometimes with faces I knew, other times just for the ride. And there was a post-modern freedom to everything, as if you could pack truth and beauty into all the dark alcoves and semi-lit places. Where every location felt a little like divinity.

I had that same feeling tonight, and it reminded of me. I sat looking outside, as if slowly moving through a jetstream of prauna or some night time romance. Most of all, I felt that familiar presence in the more distant sections I was driven around. As if they were calling out to me..or at least as if I could hear them again.

One of the reasons I took up photography was to do shots of lights at night, particularly around foliage or trees. It's reflective of a deep longing. For however long it's been now, part of me has felt a pull to go back to that world. Where the nights were clear, the air almost cold, and I could feel scintillating balls of energy off in the distance. Part of me knows what they look like in a way. One of my photographs, 'Council of the Orbs', does a decent job of potraying it.

It's the same longing I feel when I look at a hillside at night, wondering what the bluffs up on top look like, how the grass and heather feels at your shins. I have seen a million lights in the darkness, and each one evokes a bit of that same feeling. Some nightly temple in the open air. As if everything had something more to it that I could only glide my fingers across.

It's as if you've come home, to what was always waiting for you. Nothing else evokes that sensation inside of me. It's sad in part, but hopeful. It reminds me of why I decided to come back here, for a last time to do some bizarrely useful and beautiful thing. And to terribly suffer in order to do it. I enjoy times like this because I realize what is waiting for me when I die. And right then, I can re-join all of the familiar ones that I can only catch reminders of in soft shining balls, in the clear cold evening.

I miss them so much sometimes that it aches. I do see the point of all of this, and things do get extremely interesting at a few points.

But if anyone asks me if I'm ever afraid to die, I'll say no and smile in that genuine, quiet way I forget about so often. I'll say that I get to go home.

Until then, I'll continue to think of how I can visit. I've come close sometimes. Not in terms of being near death, no, just the right moment, time, and place where I can feel them again.

And maybe I'll forget that I'm the dream again.

Maybe.

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