SPARK

Mark Owen Martin
Musical Montage ===> SingularityOboeCelloHarp (MP3 )
Inspiration Piece

Dream
By Amy Moffitt
Response

Waking up like coming up from the bottom of a river… the colors are a sherbet swirl.  Her body feels light, she is waking up feeling thirsty, feeling hungry, as though her senses are pushing her out, pushing her awake.  She can smell the air around her, spring-damp and clean, and she breathes it in deeply as the colors begin to form into shapes and the shapes begin to look familiar and she’s in the garden.  She’s fallen asleep in the garden again. She wonders if she should call out for Mother… if she’ll be in the house or out front looking for her. She stretches out, feeling the warmth of the sun on her skin…

And as she feels her body stretch out, feels its resistance, all the pains, the stiffness, time collapses in a rush.  She isn’t 16… she’s 73.  In this garden, in her garden, not her Mother’s… Mother died years ago and left her the house… she has fallen asleep again in the sun.  This garden, site of so many of her life’s events… she lets her body relax, the aches subside and she floats into the elastic space of her memories.  She is 48, and her youngest daughter has brought over her first child, Abigail… all dark sparkling eyes and dimpled cheeks.  She is 27, and she is staring at the back wall of the garden, a bruise across her cheek the marker of her decision to finally leave him.  She is 34, and she is watching the leaves dance down off the trees in a rare moment of quiet… her sister has taken the children for the weekend so that she can rest.

These memories come to her and she watches them… feeling pushed and pulled through them, feeling her body change with the years, feeling her emotions swell, pull, fold back into themselves.  As she shape-shifts through her own story, she has a growing sense of sadness.  All of life’s lessons… all the things she learned…all the mistakes she made… her children made them, too.  And her grandchildren are making them.  And her great-grandchildren will make them.  What good is a lifetime of stories if no one else learns from them?  Why haven’t her stories changed the decisions of her family?

She is fully awake now, and watching a white butterfly pass over her head, landing on the huge snowball petals of her favorite hydrangea, white wings disappearing into the crush of white petals.  And she thinks, we all disappear.  There is nothing to be done but to enjoy what we have while we have it.  We are our own sole reservoir of the stories we’ve lived.

And somehow, suddenly, it is enough for her.  She closes her eyes again, feeling the sun on her skin, and lets the images of her life’s stories play again in her mind, feels the swirl and the pull and the tug.  It is enough to have lived these things.  It is enough.