THE FUTURE OF DREAMS

Yesterday while out on one of our excursions we went to look at a piece of mountainside land we'd thought about buying 10 years ago when we were looking for the land we finally bought.

It was the same road as back then, but like so many of memory's roads, it didn't lead to the same place anymore; it led instead to another mystery. As the road wound up the mountain, it took us past a very large structure of stone on a small plateau shelving off the mountainside. I pulled over and got out to look at it more closely.

At first I took it to be the ruins of a castle, but a little more thought soon did away with that surmise: the mountain loomed up behind it; bad location for a castle. On closer examination it resembled an ancient tumulus, now very derelict from centuries (millennia?) of weather and tremor...

The site had clearly become a very popular dumping ground for free disposal of the many things one has to pay a fee to dump nowadays, all tossed into what looks to have been a sort of moat around the structure (moats are frequently characteristic of ancient tumuli here)...

The structure itself comprised very large stones (about half the size of our van), all fairly tumbledown, apart from the still intact high facet that had caught my eye. Another odd thing was that there were no historical signs around as to what the structure might be, nor were there any signs of archaeological excavation, all the more intriguing because as far as I know there's nothing very historical on the mountainsides this far north along the western shore of the Lake; most of the big-time history took place along the eastern shore (e. g., Nobunaga’s Castle) or further south on this shore. As well, this location was inconveniently high up on the mountain, with nothing else around; why all the way up here?

Whenever I see such mysterious ruins, where humanity past is speaking a time-transcendant form of language to humanity present, my temporary existence is filled with a sense of eternity at perceiving the true vastness of human time, at knowing that so long ago hundreds or thousands of workers sweated and strained, as with these stones, to build a structure to honor someone they revered or obeyed with a purpose that filled - even transcended - their own lives, and now all that remains of their efforts is the whisper of fallen stones in the wind, the disparate blending of honor and folly in anonymity...

Are we ourselves today any different, in our ambitions? Does the same fate await our own highest dreams, will they too one day serve merely as a place for folks to abandon whatever the future equivalent may be of pickup trucks and tvs, refrigerators and teapots, stereos and bedsprings?

Here's hoping we make it further than that...