Sunday, November 2, 2025 at 1:05 AM
  There are times, usually late at night, when sleep escapes me and my troubled mind, when I am carried away by choral or New Age music. Motets, cantatas, evensong, songs of Camelot or from Coptic churches in Ethiopia, Gregorian chants, or even sometimes music from the Renaissance period. I sit in the dark and close my eyes and I find myself carried away by the beauty, the solemnity, the pleas of another world, another time. I find myself melding into the furniture, the room, the music, and go into this space where reality is suspended, and I become weightless, mindless, floating, totally free, traveling into some other dimension.
  Before I continue, no, I’m not high or drunk; well, maybe a little wine, but I am writing this with the clarity of someone who is feeling more and more lost in the present. Maybe it is age, or romance, or that feeling of vulnerability, or unfulfilled dreams, that makes me want to live in a place where there are no dark clouds hovering about, where life is a fairytale. You know, maybe I am high on weed and forgot that I was smoking a little while ago. Wat a ting!
  Where do these feelings come from, and why do I feel the need to share them with you? You have your own issues to deal with. Maybe I share as a form of therapy, to escape this very foreboding reality that surrounds me, that surrounds all of us. I could fantasize about living in many of the beautiful places I’ve visited, but that foreboding reality would follow me there. It has to be surrealistic, floating away on my overactive imagination.
  It has to be a place that is otherworldly, like Rivendel or Lothlorien, in Lord of the Rings, and J.R. Tolkien’s Sanctuary for the Elves. A place where nothing from our present can touch us, affect us. No negativity, only peace and quiet, and the promise of light and love and joy and peace and magic. Where one never ages, never grows old, as I mentioned before, otherworldly.
  My point is that music sometimes is the best therapy. It is free and available, and to me, almost sacred as a potion to soothe one’s troubled mind; its healing powers are unlimited and underestimated, in my opinion. So, I float away into the comfortable arms of sleep and dreams and promises of a better tomorrow. I also know that this feeling cannot last, but just to have those ecstatic moments of calm and fantasy, this escape from reality, is enough.
  Boy, I really must be getting old. I could be dreaming of being surrounded by beautiful mermaids; but then, eventually they would just turn out to be manatees and mess up my fantasy. I must be high, or drunk, or both!
Glen
