theft

I have been having vivid dreams. As demonstrated in the entry prior to this one. In one, I knew and acknowledged that I was dreaming. But I didn’t seize control and change the circumstances. I just let them propel me as they would had I not understood that I was dreaming. But even that glimmer of knowledge… my thoughts keep going back to it. I’m trying to make a more concerted effort toward lucid dreaming. I think if I was able to grasp control of and shape the world of my dreams, I’d be more able to do so in my actual life, something that will come in handy quite shortly, as I’ll be returning to America in August as another jobless twenty-something with a degree that requires more degrees to be worth anything.

And I’ve come to terms with the fact that “more degrees” is not where my ship is sailing. At least not for a long while. And that is something that both excites and terrifies me. I’ve been drifting so successfully since I graduated from college. Living in a real world and having real experiences and stockpiling them into something powerful inside of me that doesn’t feel like it’s a product of just myself. In Japan, people often pick up whatever small stone catches their eye on their way up to a temple. When they reach it (temples are usually atop stairs, a hill, or a mountain) they place the stone somewhere, near a shrine or on a stone lantern. You see piles of stones, all placed with intention by a multitude of people, and that’s how the little tower of wisdom that I’m operating from feels to me right now. Now, to make sense of all of those highly intentioned stones. There are bursts of clarity, but it often feels like building a castle with stones and no mortar.

I’m feeling up for the challenge.

My little town here is famous in Japan for having the largest rose park in the country. It’s a truly spectacular place boasting of roses in colors that I didn’t even know existed in the floral spectrum. There are also roses planted all the way up and down the main streets of the town. The rainy season is coming and the air has been damp and pregnant with the scent of a thousand blooming roses, and I’ve been hatching a plan to bring this luscious spring atmosphere into my house. Tonight, when it got dark, I went outside in dark clothes with a backpack, scissors, and my headlamp. I walked out to a part of the road near my house that doesn’t have any other residences on it. It’s a bit of road lined by rice paddies, and the constant croaking of the little green frogs that frequent said rice paddies was interrupted only with the deep belly call of a lone bullfrog, hoping it was a species-appropriate lady amphibian rustling in the bushes instead of a bipedal rose thief. When a gap came in the traffic, I turned on my headlamp to search the nearest bush for a perfect rose. There were more cars than I expected. I kept walking slowly whenever there were cars coming, hoping to stop at a differently colored bush when there were no eyes on me. I managed to pluck four roses. One white, one pink, and two a galactic glowing mix between pink and orange. When I got them back into my house and laid them on the floor, I was disappointed by the condition of the white one. Its outer petals were shriveled and spotted, with tiny bugs crawling all over them. Out the window with that one! There were some bugs on the others, so tiny, I shook them off and onto the floor, crushed and cleaned them up with one fell swoop of a tissue. I couldn’t have gotten them all, though. Certainly, there are some rose-bugs currently wandering around my apartment, wondering what to do with themselves. And the roses, they are all lined up in jars on the windowsill in my kitchen.

<3clea