It is common to take the dog for a walk. It is less common to take a dream for a walk.
To set out with the rising sun and an empty mind and wander the narrow path that leads to the sea. To find rising in the mind a dream one had but didn’t remember at the time. To ponder the dream and relive its mysterious hints.
To find, walking beside one like a pet unicorn, the vision of a happy future. This fills the world with rich colours.
Walking with a dream works wonders on the malleable forms of the world. Obstacles bend into the shape of one’s hopes. Difficulties refigure themselves into triumphs. One’s cross becomes a leaping place to the stars. The blues and reds and yellows turn into tangible currencies of fortune. One plucks gifts from the air. The tree of thorns becomes that tree of the Hesperides, bearing golden fruit.
Lucky are those who walk with gods. Only strong dreamers shape the magic that makes all things real.
But how strange it is, on a morning when the air disperses colours like birds in flight, to find a woman wandering along the shore, walking her fish. She is curved like music from an Aeolian harp. The air bears the sea blues and the dazzling gold of her dress, in an aquamarine dream.
In truth she was not walking her fish. The fish was taking the lady for a walk. She was in a philosophical mood that morning. Not so the fish, who preferred the silence of colours.
‘What are things made of?’ asked the lady.
‘Things are made of the way you see.’
‘What is it that makes the way you see?’
‘The way you are makes the way you see.’
‘What makes the way you are?’
‘Sometimes it is the way you feel.’
‘And what makes how you feel?’
‘The spirit,’ said the fish, testily, ‘whether it be open or closed, narrow or wide, whether it flows like the sea or is frozen like ice.’
‘But what makes the spirit?’
‘That’s enough philosophy for a morning’s walk,’ said the fish.
It might have happened in a parable. It might have happened in a missing gospel of women. The miracle then would not be the multiplication of loaves and fishes. The miracle would be our conversion into the mysteries of the sea.