I dreamed last night a vision of such breathtaking beauty that even in my dream I knew I could never adequately convey how sublimely, ethereally lovely it was. In my dream I scrambled and failed to take a photo before it vanished. But as I sit here trying to put it into words, I feel amazed that my mind could create such a place, and to carry such exquisite, pure and utter beauty in my head even now feels like a blessed gift.
I was traveling amid mountains, snowy white and deep, deep blue, in a lavishly and ornately appointed zeppelin. Everything from polished bronze to dark mahogany gleamed behind and beneath rich drapery and soft cushions. The craft was wonderful in and of itself, gliding along in silky, soundless luxury, but it was only the vehicle that I rode in.
We were traveling to Shangri-La, deep in these snowy mountains. We had seen nothing on the ground, but that wasn't where Shangri-La could be seen. Just as the sun was fully risen, we floated slowly up above the clouds.
As the shafts of fresh sunlight poured in around us between two peaks, the clouds around us turned to fine floating drifts of crystal ice, glittering like snow banks or vast piles of diamonds. And rising from these clouds, suddenly, were spires and chains and light, airy towers, with a thousand baubles and bells dancing and tinkling in the breeze, and everything made of glass-bright metal, licked into gleaming gold by the light of the new day. They rose around us like ships un-sinking from the sea of scintillating mist, with the sweet, gentle, chiming song of the bells drifting over us in tiny ripples of sound.
As the sun continued to rise, the clouds began to melt away, and that holy, magical, and deeply stirring city sank back into gray fog and vanished, leaving the clean air and vast forest below empty and haunted by the faint and far off ringing of bells.
I can't describe the awe, the wonder, the solemn joy that filled my soul with this vision. And the words of Coleridge keep running through my head.
"If a man could pass through paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke-- Aye, and what then?"
