Dream d900-s: Frequency of Stone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ground was opened up and waiting.

We had made camp at the edge of a construction site, Lano and I, where a low concrete slab spread out under stars like a gray lake, still and flat. Chalk lines crossed it in orange and white - thin bright threads marking where the walls would rise, where the pipes would run below, where the load would go. I sat near a small fire built in an oil drum someone had left, and the warmth barely reached past my knees.

Lano circled the perimeter once, nose low, and came back to sit beside me. "Cimientos," he said, in the way he sometimes named the thing I was looking at before I had a word for it.

The crane was overhead. Not moving. It rested on a horizontal I-beam near the top of a temporary structure, white as chalk against the darker sky, and I watched it watching the site below. Its neck was folded into itself. Patient in the way only something with long sight can be patient.

I walked out onto the slab when the fire had settled. My boots on poured concrete, the chalk lines running under me and out ahead. I crouched near where two lines crossed and held the notebook against my knee. Six voices already written in it. The Student's careful questions filling the back pages. And what I was learning now, here at the edge of a thing not yet built, was something none of them had said directly.

The Listener, in that cellar full of racks, had heard the signal inside the noise. Had known a frequency before she could prove it. I was doing something like that now, looking at chalk on concrete. The slab told me how heavy the thing above it would be, how wide, what stress it was made to carry. The rebar grid just visible at the near edge - uncovered, waiting for the pour - showed me the skeleton before the body. A structure decided before it existed.

I could read a foundation the way she had read a waveform.

I sat down on the slab with my back to the fire's low glow and wrote that in the notebook. Not a lesson. A recognition. Something I had earned by walking away from workshops and into open country with a white dog who named things in a language I was still learning.

The crane did not move all night. In the morning the chalk lines would still be there, patient, uncovered, waiting for the weight they were drawn to hold.