Something for Friday

 
This is a fragment I found in my files.  It isn't going anywhere except towards many adjectives, but I thought it would be nice to have in July.  Hope you enjoy it as a break from politics and all the mean things that sometimes make us forget the important things in life.
 
  Gardens of the Soul
 
These gardens have no limits. Anything and everything is possible. You can walk down a busy street, turn, and suddenly find yourself facing a secret garden behind a vine-covered crumbling stone wall, a garden no-one has entered for centuries, where nature has joined the long-dead gardener in creating a masterpiece of solitude, mystery and peace.   You can push open the enormous creaking gates, just enough to slip through, and walk into green shadows where statues of mermaids spray silver wands of water into the still air, where climbing roses with trunks like oak trees hang drunkenly over moss-covered garden benches, where grassed-over brick paths turn and twist, and a new wonder awaits you behind every bend.
 
Or you can enter a garden of night, with darkness enveloping you on all sides like wall hangings of black velvet, embroidered with the fluttering lights of live candles, the fligth paths of moths and the luminescent faces of white lilies and roses. You can let the scents of night permeate your soul or the sounds of night permeate your dreams. Does the darkness teem with playing children, children playing hide-and-seek, whispering to each other, tiptoeing past each other, their distant laughter like little tinkling bells or croaks of tiny frogs?
 
Or visit the garden of wind, sand and stone where silence is a sound, the sky is wiped clean again and again, where the stones speak to the sand and the sand answers, and where you become sand, stone and wind, swept clean, ever moving yet still and whole.