CHAPTER 4

Rebirth (June- summer)

music: satie

Lying outside with my flute, I’m reflecting on who or what brought me here. I go back to the beginning and start thinking of my namesake. According to Mom, when I was born, her first words to me were “Welcome to this beautiful world, my dear Jasmine Rose Francis.” (My first words were “Mama,” “Dada,” and “Abba! Abba!,” my attempt at Alice.) But my dad went online to look up names of people with my birthday—May 4th. What he’d found was Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired Lewis Carroll to write Alice in Wonderland. (Yes, Alice is real! How cool is that?) Somehow, Dad convinced Mom to change her mind about the name she’d first whispered to me. So, while I was originally born as flowers (Jasmine Rose), I return home as Alice Liddell Francis. Looking back, I’m pretty thankful for Dad’s insight and persistence. While I love flowers, I’ve always imagined myself to be so much more.

I get out my Dreams & Ponderings journal and start writing my favorite lines from Through the Looking Glass- from memory because I’ve always loved it. After Alice’s adventures have come to an end, she wakes up lying on her living room floor, wondering if she dreamed it all up or if the dream dreamed her. And as I write the book’s last lines, the hairs on my arms raise:

In a Wonderland they lie,

Dreaming as the days go by,

Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream-

Lingering in the golden gleam-

Life, what is it but a dream?

I used to think that poem was lovely nonsense. What does it mean to linger in the golden gleam? You see a golden sunset so beautiful it leaves you breathless and the beauty lingers? Or maybe our life is the golden gleam- our beautiful life, gone in a flash. I see L.C. writing those simple, profound words from a far off century. Life, what is it but a dream?

I’m pondering this in our backyard while leaning against my favorite tree. I think back to a few years ago, when I discovered the original druids. They were a religious sect that worshipped forest spirits and trees- oak being the most sacred to them. Anyway, I wrote down the names of some druids of history, then went to sit under my Gambel oak’s protective branches, speaking their names out loud, hoping I’d get a reaction. But I didn’t feel anything. I sat a while longer and then, out of the blue, I say: Drew, the Druid Oak! The tree’s instant response was enough to ensure that I’d picked the perfect name to honor both him, and the druids. And the best part is finding out druids and oak trees have a sense of humor!

Now I smile, resting my cheek against his trunk, speaking his name aloud:

Drew.

Closing my eyes, I lean back against his trunk and suddenly I’m a princess, sitting on a throne of oak leaves, surrounded by an enchanted kingdom. Hearing songbirds singing, I open my eyes, watching the open flowers sway in the gentle breeze, echoing the birdsongs. The loving, living shafts of sunlight brighten nature’s music, and the world hums along. I feel my shoulders sway to the rhythm of it. My dreams were never this vivid, or this real. I stand up and begin dancing through my past, through my pain, dancing off the path. Making my own path, I move to the music around me, however measured or far away.  Dancing the dream awake, the old, scarred, lonely me dies and a new, vibrant, alive Alice is reborn- born in the spirit of music, the spirit of water and wind, trees and flowers.

I sit and drink it all in. Then after a while I go back inside to get Luna, so we can sit with Drew and play Satie for our friends: being present with the cicadas and crickets, the wind and leaves, the chickadees and songbirds. They all listen and sing with me. They understand me. They know what love really is.