Heart's desire...

Here’s the little mountain I can see from our cottage bedroom window. Away across the fields over the stream and along a muddy lane, a long walk or a short drive and a very short walk away. It probably isn’t a mountain at all, it’s probably just a hill, but in shape and contour and in my head it’s a mountain.

I don’t know what the mountain is called or even if it has a name, although my feeling is that it does, and I don’t know if there is a story or legend attached to it although there will be, there always is.

I think about this mountain a lot, I think about it as I fall asleep, a charm to make me to sleep. I walk the mountain path and as I walk I pass things on the path - a rock, a tree, a standing stone. Sometimes I walk the mountain into sleep and begin to dream and when I dream I sometimes dream about the golden hare. Here is how my dream goes...

I'm in the body of an old man walking on the mountain at midnight, the moon is full and silver and the air is sharp. I pass the rock and the tree and stroke the standing stone with my fingers as I pass it by.

"Brother" I say.

"Brother" the standing stone replies.

As I walk I come across a golden hare caught in a hunter’s snare. The hare tells me that he is a magic hare and that if I free him he will grant me whatever my heart desires – riches, power, youth, eternal life, anything at all.

I (inside the old man) think long and hard and then I reply; “I am old and have lived a long and varied life. I have known happiness and sorrow, times of plenty and times of empty, I have known love and I have felt betrayal, I have walked with a spring in my step and hobbled - caught by cold - with tired, bent bones. I have lived my life long and slow and to a tune of my own and of others making. As for riches and power, I need neither, nor do I want for youth or eternal life - what should I do with THEM? I should only make the same mistakes and spend my life, or perhaps eternity learning my lessons over and over again.

Brother I set you free. I wish for nothing in return."

And with that I loosen the snare and set the golden hare to flight.

"Brother." Calls the hare as he leaps off down the mountain.

"Brother."

I always wake up wishing that I really was that old man, not because of what he does or who he is, but offered the chance of my heart’s desire outside of dream I’d take it each and every time.

Who would not?