Last Nights Dream

Last night I had a dream, the kind of dream that stays with you for the following day. The dream had so many old friends in it. Actually it had many people in it, but no one was a major player. Cameo parts for each one. It seems this dream was influenced by a few things that I saw or experienced yesterday.
Last night Emery and I watched a PBS show on the train that runs through Alaska. For most of my life its been a dream to just take off to Alaska and live in some cabin there and live like the Wilderness family.
I have a bit of an adventuresome spirit you might say. I saw cabin after cabin in this show. Awakening in me an old desire.
Well in this dream, I had a cabin, weathered with age, that deep dark rich brown of old wood, streaked with silver gray. It was on a bit of a hillside, surrounded by tall pines. The windows, two in front, one on each side of the low front door. Small windows. Modest in size to allow light, but keep the cold at bay.
I stood outside this worn log home of mine, snuggled into the hillside, moss poking out around it like bits of emeralds amid a first snow, there was no sound in this dream but the wind blowing through the trees and the hushed voices of the people that came by. Each person, someone I had once known or know now, came by to see this cabin and tell me that in looking back over their lives, running here and there, accumulating things or possessions they thought they had to have, they all realized that in the final hours of life, none of that mattered. It was relationships, it was who they had become, or not become that weighted on their minds. The missed opportunities to be real and authentic in this world of ours. To touch the earth and feel its gentle heartbeat, to see the sky each and every night with eyes filled with wonder. To hear their own heartbeat as they walked a less trodden path in life.
Each one carried with them an object that had weighed them down in life, an albatross around their own necks in a way. So many people have worked two jobs in life just to have a pretty couch, or a fancy home, when in the end they have lost relationships. Time spent chasing things to make them look more successful, but in the end they sit alone. Their children not wanting to spend time with them, you remember the song, The Cats in the Cradle. Its truth. Your life comes back to haunt you in the manifestation of children or friends with no time to visit you in the quiet hours of your life. Then bitterness sets in and no one cares to be near you. I have seen it time and time again.
So this little dream, cabin in the woods, the air filled with the scent of pine and earth, yes there was the sense of smell in my dream, odd now that I think of it.
In this little dream, a truth was shown me. Keep on my path of simplicity and walking tenderly and quietly so that what is real and honest can be whispered in my ear. Things are just that, things.
In the end, I want no albatross around my neck.

The picture, taken a couple winters ago in the snow, along our property line to the south.