Daydreaming

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To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

                 --Emily Dickenson

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     Reverie—being lost in thought—is daydreaming about other places, other times. About prairies, about forests. I do a lot of it. All of us do. But it is especially required of poets and storytellers.

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     It serves many intentions: sometimes to escape the moral debris of our civic vandalism, sometimes to seek an inner voice timidly hiding in the shadows. Sometimes we daydream only to entertain ourselves, as fairy tales

entertain. As one-eyed pirates and shining knights do.

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     When I was a teen, my mother would sometimes chide my daydreaming. “An idle mind is the Devil’s playground.” She repeated the words her own mother had used.

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     Today, deep into retirement and further along in wisdom, I know that my mind was never idle (though often distracted, particularly in Mrs. Walton’s math class). Thoughts and images cascaded—then as now.

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     Today, more accustomed to quality idleness, we know that reverie is improved with proper practice. It stretches and burnishes time itself and so buys us a little. But until

late in life, we accept the folk wisdom of Mom and Dad about the dangers of idleness—to be left alone with our thoughts. Perish forbid!

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     In a 2014 report in Science, college students preferred mild electric shock to being left idle in an empty, dark room for 15 minutes. For young adults, external stimulation is so often preferable to the effort to generate it from within.

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     Today, with more idleness in our external lives, we often find a richness inside that contradicts the old caution against idle minds. Stubbornness keeps it near the surface. The rediscovered reverie serves us well! It was there all along, amid the clover and the bees.

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Ron Wetherington