Samhain                                                          Moon of the Winter Solstice

Ever have a fleeting moment of intense interest in something?  Say, military planning or the Tang dynasty or who was Zoroaster anyway?  Intense here means wanting to stop that moment and pick up a book on the Roman epic poem then another then another then Roman epic poems or the reverse order.  Just intense longing to know, to scratch an intellectual itch because you. need.  to. know.

Perhaps you see a scene on a TV show that reminds you of a movie that suddenly you have to see.  Or, maybe a scene in a movie inspires a trip to somewhere, say New York City in the summer of 1968 or a slide in an art history lecture about the churning of the sea of milk finds you tickets in hand for Siem Reap, Cambodia on the next plane out of Bangkok.

An artifact or a magazine photo makes the four corners area and its pueblo dwellings, the mystery of the Anasazi the focus of your next vacation.

A painting hanging here says we must hold fast to the dream that reason will prevail.  That seems off.  What will prevail are these momentary infatuations, these long lost loves of places and people and books.  Reason has had its shot.  Heard round the world.  Now let dreams themselves have a chance to prevail.

Reason works in pounding engines and the quiet electronic transfers within computers great and small, but when dreams float into the mind.  Well, then.  The dream sweeps reason into a corner, where it well might do something productive, but not because anyone cares. At least not at that moment.

We must that dreams and their reasons will prevail.  That a dream filled with temples shot through with roots of the Kapok tree can merge with Times Square when the ball is about to drop and make a world chained to the past and open to the future.