"It's different for everyone who comes. When you travel in a dream, you can bring nothing across with you; you can bring nothing back. Only what is in your head."
And that's my real problem. I know my dream worlds are real, but it's a different kind of real from what I can find in the waking world. I work out all of my problems in my dreams— from my mother abandoning me to my never seeming to be able to maintain a good relationship, But the solutions don't have any real holding power. They don't ever seem to resonate with the same truth in the waking world as they do in my dreams. And that's because I can't bring anything tangible back with me. I have to take it all on faith and for some things, faith isn't enough.
"Perhaps you expect too much," Kokopelli says when I try to explain this to him. "We are shaped by our experiences, and no matter where those experiences occur, they are still valid. The things you have seen and done don't lose their resonance because you can only hold them in your memory. In that sense there is little difference between what you experience when you are awake or when you dream. Keepsakes, mementos, tokens... their real potency lies in the memories they call up, rather than what they are in and of themselves."
"But I don't always understand the things I experience?"
Kokopelli smiles. "Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?"
He picks up his flute and begins to play. His music carries us through the afternoon until the shadows deepen and twilight mutes the details of the desert around us. Although I don't hear a pause in the music, at some point he's put on his pack and I look up to see him silhouetted against the sunset. For a moment I don't see a man, but a hunchbacked flute-playing Kachina.
"Tell Max," he says, "to remember me as loving him."
And then he steps away, into the night, into the desert, into the sky— I don't know where. I just know he's gone, the sound of his flute is a dying echo, and I'm left with another mystery that has no answer:
If he was Peter, how did he know so much about me?
And if he wasn't, then who was he?
17
"I've been thinking a lot about the desert lately," Max said.
He and Sophie were having a late dinner in The Rusty Lion after taking in a show. They had a table by the window and could watch the bustling crowds go by on Lee Street from where they sat.
"Are you thinking of moving back to Arizona?" Sophie asked.
Max shook his head. "I probably will one day, but not yet. No, I was thinking more of the desert as a metaphor for how my life has turned out."
Sophie had often tried to imagine what it would be like to live with a terminal disease, and she thought Max was probably right. It would be very much like the desert: the barrenness, the vast empty reaches. Eyerything honed to its purest essence, just struggling to survive. There wouldn't be time for anything more. She wondered if she'd resent the rich forests of other people's lives, if she knew her own future could be cut short at any time.
"I think I know what you mean," she said.
Max laughed. "I can tell by the way you look that you've completely misunderstood me. You're thinking of the desert as a hopeless place, right?"
"Well, not exactly hopeless, but..."
"It's just the opposite," Max said. "The desert brings home how precious life is and how much we should appreciate it while we have it. That life can still flourish under such severe conditions is a miracle. It's an inspiration to me."
"You're amazing, you know that?"
"Not really. We all know we're going to die someday, but we like to pretend we won't. Given the hand I've been dealt, I don't have the luxury of that pretense. I have to live with the reality of my mortality every day of my life. Now I could just give up— and I won't pretend to you that I don't have my bad days. But when I tested positive, I made myself a promise that I was going to dedicate whatever time I have left to two things: to fight the stigmas attached to this disease, and to squeeze everything I can out of life."
The waitress came by with their orders then and for a while they were kept busy with their meals.
"You look a little gloomy," Max said later, when they were waiting for their coffees. "I hope I didn't bring you down."
"No, it's not that."
"So tell Uncle Max what's bothering you."
"My problems seem so petty compared to what you have to put up with."
"Doesn't make them any less real for you, though. So 'fess up. Are you having man trouble again? We can be such bitches, can't we?"
"I suppose," Sophie said with a smile, then her features grew serious. "I just get tired of arguing. Everything starts out fine, but it always ends up with me having to adjust my life to theirs and I'm just not ready to do that anymore. I mean, I know there's going to be compromise in a relationship, but why does it always have to be on my side?"
"Compromise is necessary," Max agreed, "so long as you never give up who you are. That isn't compromise; that's spiritual death. You have to remain true to yourself."
"That's what I keep telling myself, but it doesn't make it any easier."
"Somewhere there is someone who'll love you for who are, not what they think you should be."
"And if there isn't" Sophie said. "If l never connect with that person?"
"Then you'll be alone."
"Alone."
Sophie sighed. She was too familiar with what it meant to be alone.
"It's hard to be alone, isn't it?" Max said.
Sophie nodded.
"But better to be alone than to settle for less than what you need... less than what you deserve."
"I suppose."
"Here," Max said. He reached down under his chair for the package he'd carried into the restaurant when he'd arrived. "Maybe this'll cheer you up."
He put the package on the table between them. Sophie looked at him. "What is it?" she asked.
"Open it up and find out."
Inside was one of Max's sculptures— a new one. Sophie recognized herself in one small figurine that made up the tableau, only she was decked out in a leather cap from which sprang a deer's antlers giving her a very mythic air. She stood in front of a saguaro on which was perched a tiny owl with a woman's face. Lounging on a rock beside her was a familiar figure in jeans, shirt and vest, cayote features under the cowboy hat. On the ground between them lay a medicine flute.
"It's beautiful," she said, looking up at Max.
"It's for you."
"I just—"
"Don't you even dare say you can't accept it."
"I just love it," Sophie said.
"Like I said," Max told her. "I've been thinking a lot about the desert lately."
"Me, too."
18
Sometimes when I'm in Mabon, walking its streets while my body's sleeping a world away, I'll get a whiff of smoke that smells like piñon and then somewhere in the crowd I'll spot a lean man who I swear has coyote ears poking up out of his hair, but he's always gone before I can get close enough to be sure.
Coyote was right about one thing: The journeys we take inside our heads never end.
I never thought I'd say this but I miss him.
Dream Harder, Dream True
Man is a genius when he dreams. Dream what you're capable of. The harder you dream it, the sooner it will come true.
1
The best artists know what to leave out. They know how much of the support should show through as the pigment is applied, what details aren't necessary. They suggest, and let the viewer fill in whatever else is needed to make the communication complete. They aren't afraid to work with a smaller palette, to delete excess verbiage or place rests on the musical staff, for they know that almost every creative endeavor can be improved with a certain measure of understatement. For isn't it the silence between the notes that often gives music its resonance? What lies between the lines of the poem or story, the dialogue the actor doesn't speak, the pauses between the dancer's steps? The spaces can be just as important as what's distinctly portrayed.