Lavender Dreams

The light has been extraordinary this past week in our little quarter of Los Angeles. A pale lavender luminescence that has cast a dream like glow through us all. It’s a feeling that is amplified by our daily experience; wrapped in the unfamiliar, we move forwards with a pace that is no longer what it was before. 

It happened to be my birthday this weekend; an event that often results in a somewhat haphazard consideration of elements past and present. Things have changed in ways I could never have imagined twelve months ago. 

Yesterday I sat on a bright balcony in Corona Del Mar, one of the prettiest locations in Southern California. I watched the cloud kingdoms, which enchant my daughter, move above me. I thought of the shapes of our experience, galloping apace with a similar fluidity over the earthly terrain below and my mind wandered around the last few weeks.

Amidst the fluctuation and instability we are all facing at this point in time, my children and I have become a school within the home. The Manjushri School it is called, named for the Buddhist bodhisattva of wisdom. White boards, books galore and more reading techniques than I can remember fill my waking thoughts. My daily interactions with my children have deepened. I realise with a painful sharpness how the passing of pure knowledge from one open mind to another, weaves bonds which last a lifetime and wards off the drudgery of lassitude and forgetful complacency.

I did move from that balcony eventually and we enjoyed one of the happiest days I can remember. We flew home at night on the freeway that I love, surrounded by a sea of moving red lights. Bob Dylan and Nick Cave played on the stereo. A sense of transcendent freedom flowed and for a moment of terrifying beauty the pathway to the stars seemed to gleam with a force brighter than any earthly light could ever know . 

Photograph of Apollo and his horses in the fountain at Versailles taken by Wendy Hodgkins Corniquet