A Lifetime Away

I had troubling dream about the government damming up the Ogeechee River back home. In the dream I got a job as a day laborer on the site where my friends once owned a fish camp. Just watching the heavy equipment tear up the area, plowing up old live oak trees and blocking the view to the river with a concrete wall. All this was in the name of progress and economic development. Thankfully I awoke from the dream, but the potential is still there. That at any point laws that were enacted to protect such places could just as quickly be taken away.

With those images of concrete and steel fresh in my mind, I started wondering about all the things we do in the name of progress. The lives we leave behind, the friends we abandon all in the name of convenience. Years ago I did that very thing, I removed myself from what I thought was a bad situation. Only to discover that all I had done was replace one bad situation with another. By refusing to face my demons head-on, I may have given myself a moments reprieve. But still the mental anguish I hadn’t let go of only festered and grew.

So while I’m long past the regrets of my actions. I’ve done my best to reestablish some of those connections I once gave up. Through mindfulness and true self-examination. I’ve learned that through compassionate listening and forgiveness, I have achieved a certain amount of peace. While in real life I may have lost access to that protected river. I can still go there in my mind and bask in the peace and silence I found there. Even though I’m hundreds of miles and a lifetime away.