Dream d780-s: Still Light On Moving Hands

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the hall was almost empty except for everything he had put in it.

Wires ran from tables to the floor and back again. Three screens glowed with diagrams no one had finished. A routing system branched across one wall in colored thread, each branch pinned to the next with small pieces of tape. The Student sat at the center of it, hands moving -- always moving -- connecting a cable to a port, disconnecting it, connecting again somewhere else. He was not looking at what he was building. He was looking for something he had not located yet.

Lano came in ahead of me and moved between the tables without disturbing anything. He knows how to be in a place. He does not announce himself.

I stood at the door for a moment. Not watching the Student. Watching the shape of what he was doing.

I recognized it. Not the wires. The motion underneath the wires. Someone who believes that if he builds one more layer the architecture will finally hold, that the right system will become the floor. I had done it differently -- sequences, patterns, numbers that seemed like they were about to resolve into something solid. The Student built rooms. I chased signals. We were both trying to build or chase our way into ground that was never going to come from more building or more chasing.

I pulled a stool from against the wall and sat down at the workbench beside him. He looked up.

I did not explain myself. I picked up a cable he had left coiled near the edge of the table and asked him where it was meant to go.

He told me. Then he told me three other places it could go, and what each connection would do, and why none of them were quite right yet.

I said: try the first one.

He did. Something on the screen changed. He stared at it. He said: it's still not --

I said: I know. Try it anyway for a while.

Lano settled near my feet and looked up at him with the patient attention he brings to everything that matters. After a moment Lano said, very quietly: "Mira."

Look.

The Student looked at the screen. Not at what was wrong with it. At what it was actually showing him.

Outside, through a high window, I could see the corner of the waystation courtyard -- the pale stone, the afternoon light, the bench where two strangers had sat across from each other two weeks before and said things they had not said anywhere else. That courtyard was still in me. It is how I recognized the Student on the first day. We had sat in the same room. We had arrived at the same waystation with different luggage and the same destination.

The teaching is not in the notebooks. It is in what happens when you pull up a stool.