I try to keep track of it all, but often I fail.

At night you sometimes climb out of the box and pray for snow. Hands to the sky, hands to heaven, praying like those old-time East Texas country folks. Snow, Lord, let it snow. Cover the earth with a white blanket. Everything is so dark and empty. Let it all be cold and slow and white. And most of the time the prayer goes unanswered as prayers often do, and so after a while you just return to the box and climb back in, closing the lid tight behind yourself. Do you ever see me there, waiting at your grave? 

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The pages of my dream book are written in crayon. They come to me at night, the dead. In my dreams. Sometimes troubled, or challenging me in some unique way. More often they are just themselves, and we sit at a table and chat. About little things, not life and death, or the afterlife. The ghosts of my life. What is it that opens the door to my dreams and lets them come in? Time is a slow moving insect at times, and yet at other times it is a lightning bolt that strikes the lone tree in the field. I try to keep track of it all, but often I fail. It isn't easy, the pages of my dream book are written in crayon, and tell of these things, time and ghosts, and doors that I cannot find even though I know in my heart they are there. 

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The voice of the clock says that it is time to return outdoors. The darkness is soft and warm like a blanket, and you have wrapped it around your tiny soul. Beneath the blanket is the skin that you don't yet understand, the skin of your parents, the skin of their parents, and theirs. And lower still is your own skin, and that flesh is cold. You know it is time to return outdoors, the clock tells you so with a tick-tock voice. Resigned to this, you wrap the darkness tighter around yourself and your history, your tiny soul, your life, and you stand and walk to the door. 

James Lee Jobe 

We are all a little broken. But last time I checked broken crayons still color the same.

Banksy

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I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.

Ching-yuan, after his enlightenment

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