He wakes and sees that he had fallen asleep under the tree where he was reading. Winter light is streaming through the woods, angel’s hair that is being washed by the creek. The water looks inviting and the sky above is smoky blue. His heart is filled with a great tenderness, first towards the woman and the child that he had been carrying on his mind.

He walks into this dell of tenderness and stops there for a while. Everything and everyone that life had put him into opposition with, come out of the shade. People he hadn’t seen in years, some who were dead to this world for many years. He sees his grandmother’s hand and hears her voice telling him stories from her youth as he is lying next to her, his young hands feeling her skin. And then he sees his childhood friends, in a circle waiting for him to throw the ball he is holding in his hands to one of them. Where are they now? Lost to time, they are physically as gone as that field in which they gathered every evening for their games. Now only tall buildings stand in that field, he was recently told.

He walks further, deeper. He sees his friends of youth, amongst whom he came to become a man. And behind them he sees those, whom he fought. His fists had punched that face and his heart whirled, a cesspool of hate, at the sight of that face, for many years. However he sees more than those acts alone. He sees the cracks in them running through the ground and into and beyond him, joining him with them. He didn’t know that then. And this awareness is quite recent, the woman and the child brought him into this awareness.

He also sees his dreams, those he had thrown away after breaking them apart, hanging as the numerous silken filaments from the tree branches. He sees her towards whom he was driven by unclassified passions that flow under the bedrock of human need. He sees his failure too, in the choices he had made; where to stop, how to reckon the thickness of the rock and how deep to drill for the secret water that never came, that never rose to his lips.

He feels tender towards his own mistakes and to the way he had hit himself, in anger for making those mistakes. He feels tender for those who in their mistakes hurt him and he in his pain, in blind reaction, lashed back at. The creek is rippled by a cold wind. Perfection perhaps then comes through acceptance and continuation of the doing. And the awareness of beauty only via watchfulness.

He walks back to the edge of the woods, singing a song, complete with this awareness of the man, of the woman and of the child.