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When you turn four, Preston, you will be as old as the sun and the earth and as old as Heaven. In the kitchen, I am lying on a rug next to the sliding glass door.  I am holding a rabbit against my chest and one arm is behind my head. The words inside are a voice. You spoke of this one thing that is freedom.

Preston, when you turn four, you will see a sphere rising from the front courtyard, as you are awake in the room which was your father’s, and first was mine, where my sister too slept in her crib. The sphere will rise with its light in every direction. The ferns which were once animal tails will each one come into its shadow, and the palm frond will become a mouth. The angel will be the whale’s middle. Its belly will go out the front gate. It will open and close the gate quietly. The key is to be thinking of these things at the same time.

What is felt in this room is God’s mother.

So does our material become.

When you are four, there will be a spoon to frost the layers of a cake. The light will begin in the cement and travel up the stucco wall—Bob Peterson’s house—and the bells will become loud. No one can hear them.

Some of the light is violet. Some of it blue. Some of it is yellow. There are no ghosts. 

Look Preston, the cloud is coming down in the form of frost. It is like a sponge. When the moment comes to run, I want you to go as quietly as you can. Run around the lake, get to the fountain at the edge of the west loop, to the bridge which goes across the loop and into the plaza. You used to play there. Go into the little movie theatre. Get to a row in the middle and get down behind the seats, lay on the floor. If you are small enough, pull your knees all the way beneath the seat, go as far down as you can.

You will know when the device is ready.

From the whale’s belly is also a light that is green. To breathe you need only shut your eyes.

The sphere you see in our front yard will make the waves around you stop. The waves will make the living and the dead as one. The sun is rising. The wetlands have burned. The water has burned. The doves which made their nest in the entryway, there did the shore begin its exchange. The family is quiet, and their eyes are clean.

You can see through the courtyard into the family’s home. If you stand very still with your hands empty, there is the feeling of a white blossom opening, and this circumference is without line.

Preston, when you turn four, we are going to go on an airplane, all of us together. You will get to sit in the window seat and the clouds and the sky and even mountains will be beneath you. You will be in the clouds.

Remember those clouds.

Preston, you will find yourself in Mr. MGregor’s garden. He will come at you with a shovel and a spade, he will come at you with the sound and smell of diamonds, he will remind you of a neighbor, but this man will have gone too far inside his house, so that his pain comes out a star field.

Keep the scent of mud in your nose and in your belly. This will make you invisible to the man who cannot read sky. If you become thirsty, think of a time-scale. If you are hungry think of the door.

Remember to look up. You know the way. Remember, everything is a circle.

April 25, 2014