And Suddenly, A Field Of Dreams

Made a meal and threw it up on Sunday

I've got a lot of things to learn.

Said I would and I'll be leaving one day,

Before my heart starts to burn.

Dead stillness. Not a gust, a puff a fanfare, a flourish. Not a sound, a whisper, a peep. No movement in the fields, none that is at least visible, no vehicles passing nearby, no invasion from other fields plying their trade or smoking their cigarettes. The sun shines bright, menacing on the world below while those who have scattered elsewhere continue about their work in silent defiance.

Times are hard when things have got no meaning

I've found a key upon the floor

Maybe you and I will not believe in

The things we find behind the door

I'm drenched head to toe in sweat and I continue to leak and perspire profusely in the hot sun. Never will I begrudge these workers with the smear of lower-classness, definitely not now as they go about their work contently while my life continues to end one minute and sun ray at a time, turning me from the prime of my youthful exuberance into a stream of melted chocolate requiring oxygen and water every other minute. Dizziness; the heat is overwhelming. Take a break, says dad as he goes to talk to one of the chili men from yesterday. I do as university taught me and gladly oblige.

The trudging turns into a stroll, the stroll into a jaunt half-skip. Past the chili, past the corn, past the sweet potato right on to the back of the farm onto a little elevation in the land lined with a fence and trees. I pick a tree to nestle under and call home, for the time being at the very least, and escape the heat.

Stand by me,

Nobody knows the way it's gonna be

The sun ducks behind the clouds to offer a moment of reprieve. Laid out before me like simple, neatly assembled Lego pieces lies the farm in its entirety. Directly in front of me and to either side are the plots of sweet potato, some ripe for harvesting as the workers grin in my direction and busy themselves to my left. Further down field the corn is clearly visible, proud and tall in the sun, a welcome maze for those seeking solitude. The dirt road cuts through the farm horizontally after the corn, beyond which thousands of chilis are being grown and beyond that is the small watermelon patch in its subterreanean modesty.

I can see my father's vision, the entire land bursting with plants and vegetables ripe for harvesting and ready to be sold back to the people. A healthy, non-corporate, community-conscious form of income, a vision I know he struggled to keep pace with both physically and mentally. The sun slowly creeps back from the other side, inching it's way across the farm until it warms my toes, but the rest of me is well shaded. Besides as I've discovered, if you can't hear the heat, you can't feel the heat.

Dreams, visions, ideas. I once heard in a song that true progress means matching the world to the vision in our heads, but instead we end up changing the vision. How many times have I done that, how many times have we all? This modern life forces everyone to yield, to conform, not to a set of ideals in the political sense but to a system, one which is perpetuated by its victims. A system that grinds away at it's workers struggling to make a living, to pay the bills, pay the car loan, feed the children, support the family while all the while climbing, reaching, grabbing and taking every last dollar and cent to achieve some semblance of a picturesque and comfortable life. A system that confuses drive, determination, ambition and happiness with financial success, and although this rhetoric I spew has been heard before, I'm not willing to cave, eventhough there are a million else out there who'd intelligently disagree.

But the world demands payment in bloodsweatandtears even for my own vision to be met, for we are all dreamers seeking to mend our reality accordingly. The agrarian world is made for me, or it may not be. Negotiation. Dreams. work.

"When they say a thousand and one times that we're dreamers, that we're romantics, that we're incorrigible idealists, that we think the impossible; then a thousand and one times we must answer that yes, we are"

The sweat from my brow drops onto my eyelids startling me awake. A reminder of now, of tomorrow. My feet begin to get restless, restless with the fact that the world I've known until now is gone; only those fixed points from that epoch have carried forward into this new age, those beautifully patient things I can't live without, patient in their static but evolutionary positions. Like swallowing a bitter pill those halcyon days are gone, buried deep in the sands of the mind for memory serves to remind us that there's a reason for visions and realities to combine, for memories and ideas to recreate and reproduce themselves into tomorrow.

Day Two, of starting over.