Unsettled Places — The Things That Belong to Other People

You begin among old ambitions.

Someone tells you that money has finally arrived, years after the labour that justified it. The announcement hangs in the air waiting for gratitude. Nothing much follows. There are recognitions that arrive after the life that required them has already drifted elsewhere.

The dream turns before disappointment acquires a voice.

A room filled with magazines. They rise in careful columns, each one another attempt to keep time from disappearing. Yet your attention falls elsewhere. One day someone will have to carry them all away. Every archive quietly appoints its future custodian.

Another room.

Another household.

Wealth settles into furniture, into silence, into the ease with which everything appears already in its place. Someone asks, laughing, which clothes you will take when you leave. The question passes like a joke, yet remains after the laughter has gone. Clothes remember bodies that were never yours.

Government money.

Someone else’s magazines.

Someone else’s wardrobe.

The dream keeps placing you among things that already belong to another life.

Then the harbour opens.

Across the water the city waits beneath the ordinary light of morning. Old men walk towards the sea without hesitation. Nakedness has become almost unnoticed, as though age had quietly relieved them of the need to explain themselves.

You look for the path.

There should be steps.

A gate.

A track through the grass.

The water is visible from everywhere, yet the way into it refuses to appear.

Notitia Health – Dreams are not puzzles to be solved but places to be inhabited. Through mythology, philosophy and contemplative psychology, Unsettled Places lingers with images long enough for them to begin speaking in their own language.