Your Toy box

“Within moments, the dust of her passion would settle back to the ground, and I’d be
alone with the mountain.”

I grew up with a toy box in my room. It was a sturdy chest; some might say it was seaworthy, as it was part of the jetsam and flotsam of our family, as we trekked from port to port, following my seafaring father. It was large enough to hold a kid during hide and seek and, on rainy days, it was a bottomless source of entertainment.

As the monotony of those rainy days pitter-pattered, I’d pull out a broken holster with its cap guns and relive the black and white western heroes of TV. Or find some toy trucks and three-wheel cars to reenact demolition derbies to help me while away the hours. But those days are gone. Gone but not forgotten.

Our minds are toy boxes of broken memories and loss lessons, rattling around in our heads like floating messages in a bottle searching for a shore.

Until one day, until that one day when its cork is popped, and like an old toy being pulled from the toy box, we reinspect it in the light of our current lives … a memory like this one.

On the weekends, after delivering newspapers to the slumbering suburbs, I’d grab my dog and head for the sagebrush wilderness. As I rounded the corner, Cowles Mountain filled my view, dwarfing the sprawl I called home.

Although most adult suburbanites would consider the sagebrush wilderness to be a chaotic land populated with an unwelcome fauna that would graze on their manicured lawns or stalk their domesticated pets. To a young boy, it was a new world. A world not to be conquered but to be explored. This was the land where Trip, my trusty beagle, and I would boldly go. A world to experience the unexpected and to re-inspect the expected.

We trekked across this unbounded backcountry, searching for alternative paths to the top of the mountain. Seldom would we ever reach the top as each fresh course would uncover a new oddity which filled the hours before our bellies would growl, and we’d have to return home.

Image a world where each step reveals the mysteries of trapdoor spiders or snapshots of a new vista where the rising sun would float above the coastal fog. As Trip and I strolled through the gallery of flora and fauna, the little beagle would catch the scent of a warren of rabbits. She’d give me a quick glance over her shoulder, as if to wink, and then gallop off into the underbrush. Within moments, the dust of her passion would settle back to the ground, and I’d be alone with the mountain. I’d journey on in search of new discoveries, knowing my little hound dog would always find me.

Rounding the next ravine, I feel a rush witnessing the rich alluvial soil carpeted with wild orange poppies. Their blazing colors fill me with an unconscious reverence, belying my age, causing me to circumnavigate this cosmic garden. Before continuing, I looked back, but all I saw then were the kaleidoscopic colors of youth.

Upon reaching the head of the ravine, I discovered a solitary poppy in full bloom. Its orange petals yearning skyward in anticipation of the rising sun. Stooping down for a closer inspection, I witnessed its tenuous grasp on the rocky terrain. Although it looked identical to the patch of poppies; it felt different to me. Its variegated colors washing from yellow to orange shined brighter in the shadowy verdant wilderness of the ravine’s headwaters. It was there, between the cathedral walls of the ravine, that I paused, as if waiting for something, some answer to a question I was too immature to ask.

Then the silence was broken by Trip’s familiar howl. I shouted back her name and within minutes we were again united. After a few scratches behind her ears, she led me out of the ravine and back home to satiate our growling bellies.  

Thinking back on our childhood journeys is like searching through a toy box and finding an old toy which triggers memories and unresolved mysteries, like the mystery of the solitary poppy and its pull on my soul.

During my lifetime, the significance of the lone poppy has always been there to give me guidance. In my college years, it spoke to me of resilience, to hold tight on to a dream, akin to the tenacity of its frail roots clinging to the rocky soil as the spring rains rushes down the ravine.

Or how, as a father, I saw each of my children as a separate soul in search of fertile ground.

Now when my mind captures the vision of that blazing poppy, I witness the juxtaposition between the fields of humanity and its renegades who bound beyond society’s norms.

What will that lone poppy teach me tomorrow?

Will I see it as I pass from this realm to the next?

If so, will it give me strength?

I cannot say.

Now it is your turn, my fellows.  

You all have this power, nay, a superpower, to solve any obstacle that comes your way by just reaching into that toy box mind of yours and pulling out a memory, a lesson, an experience and reinspecting it in the new light of your current life.

Seize this moment. Right now, close your eyes and open your curiosity.

Without the handicap of sight, imagine, you are walking through a dark tunnel, yet the farther you walk, the more the air around you fills with postcard images of your life. These memories float around you like the leaves of fall.

Now step into one of those postcards.

There you will discover,

“Your life is a journey,

   your life is a discovery,

      your life is sacred.”

From the sacrosanctity of your memories, we anxiously await your enlightenment to radiate into the cathedrals of our lives.

        

Listen to this story.

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