Kaleidoscope
Brightly Colored Memories

I am a kaleidoscope
  of brightly colored
  broken memories

shaken this way
  one day—
that way the next

Remember those amazing paper or plastic tubes with angled mirrors and pieces of colored paper or glass in the bottom, and how these colorful, amazing patterns appeared as if by magic and changed with each shake of this miracle toy? Kept me out of trouble for hours.

Today, looking back over the long years, my days could/would change as drastically, if not as beautifully. One morning, my world would be warm and brilliantly sunny as my little room’s large window faced east and had no problem letting the sun in to fill my day. And growing up in northern Sweden, in the summer this would happen at three or so in the morning.

But you get used to this and you get good at going back to sleep to resurface in a few hours.

Brightly colored, youthful kaleidoscope pieces.

Other mornings, rainy ones perhaps, clean-cool water drip-drip-dripping from the trees outside my open window, the air cool and moist and very fragrant. Easier now to turn over and head back to sleep unless your mother bangs on the door again, time to rise and shine apparently, school day and all.

Rainy, still youthful kaleidoscope pieces.

One morning, the one after my first kiss (and I can still taste it) and the kaleidoscope had gone crazy blissed. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the world—well, one thing: she was not here, for we were young and there was no sex yet or sleeping over involved. She had left shortly after that miraculous revelation of what a kiss could be, leaving me starved for more and more and more.

Later I wrote a long song called “Time” where one section reminisced about this wonder of a kiss and reads like this:

Gingerly the lips collide
the honey of the tongue
melts to form a glow
a rush, a river

Love's forever rising tide
now innocent and young
surges in a slowly
mounting quiver

This moment is sweet to touch
sweet to feel

Harboring such
ever surreal
pleasure

Still, time is so hard to catch
hard to hold

When dreams all hatch
awed by your old
mythical treasure

I still think of her now and then, although she has to be in her seventies by now just like I am. Then, she was a wisp of a girl who for some amazing reason knew how to kiss.

Glorious kaleidoscope colors and patterns called love.

But when it comes to shaking up the kaleidoscope, truly and fully, nothing holds a candle to dreams. Nothing shakes and mixes up the pieces quite like they do.

Weirdly, I often dream of my old jobs, in various configurations, and about parking my car in places or on streets where I can never find it again.

Once I dreamed about a mountain with a wide clearing down its wooded slope and suddenly the most beautiful melody rang out from speakers the size of houses along the tree-filled sides. The melody was so beautiful that it woke me up, and with it still in mind I found a recorder and hummed the melody into it before I returned to sleep.

I have since learned how to play this melody on my flute, and I play it often.

Another melody surfaced about a month later, and ditto. I hummed it into my recorder before going back to sleep and I can play it, too, on my flute.

No dream melodies since then, though.

So many bits and so many pieces and so many colors and so many combinations. Dreams.

And then there are the images that arise now and then when I meditate. Out of nowhere, into nowhere. Like little, or not-so-little fish swimming past the aquarium window and then out the side of it, into invisibility, strangely.

Sometimes (happily) my mind manages to organize the colored flecks into poems and then they rise, unsolicited and spontaneously. This can happen at any time though mostly during my walks along the Pacific (and mostly not so pacific) shoreline (Yes, I am blessed).

Writing, too—like writing this right now—brings a host of different shakes of the kaleidoscope and sometimes, a little astounded, I read on my laptop screen what my fingers hammer out on the keyboard, seemingly on their own. Then again I am a descent touch-typist so my fingers type what I think as I think it, it’s just that I’m sometimes surprised at what I think (i.e., read on the screen).

I love writing.

I love kaleidoscopes.

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