To continue with my take on how much our fantasies have bearing on our lives for good or bad, I can’t help but wonder if our trip to Paris is the result of my childhood fantasies: that of wanting to be an Indian only to end up drawing pictures of them and eventually all things connected with them, the land and what it all stood for, not just in Rousseauian dreams, but our dreams as a country, as a people, and eventually the human race in its quest for meaning, the “New World,” the “Promised Land,” our quest for the Eden we can’t go back to – or the Heaven which we hope we can? The “American Dream” was never the “Brazilian Dream,” or the Mexican Dream, or the Canadian dream, but always uniquely the American dream. So what is it that made our country so special in the eyes of the rest of the world? In the beginning of the second novel of my trilogy, I start out with the verse from Ecclesiastes that says “God has made everything beautiful and its time, He has put eternity in the hearts of men” and then proceed to reveal the bulk of the narrator’s paintings that deals with this very subject throughout the rest of that novel of the trilogy – but always in the context of his narrative, making both inseparable – both the verbal and the visual, acting more as counterpoint than mere illustrations.
So what’s all that got to do with Cotswold and the Highlands and fulfilling all my daughters’ fantasies of drinking tea with Jane Austin and running around the Highlands like a Scottish heroine of old? From our old English cottage in Cotswold to our castle in the Highlands, my daughter’s could not have found a better place to explore those fantasies very much the way I did when I was young living with the Lakota Indians on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota – all of which in many ways was for me and hopefully will be for them the continuation of a lifelong search for what it is we are all meant to do and be.
Our cottage in England, our castle in Scotland, our trip to Paris to see where one of my dreams culminated? Who knows? Some day when we connect the dots, we’ll see the big picture? In the meantime, I leave you the following photos.
To be continued