Jean Stimmell is a retired stone mason and psychotherapist living in Northwood. He blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com and jstim.substack.com.

Years ago, I wrote in these pages about a French philosopher, a Renaissance man who lived from 1894 to 1962 and wrote about poetry, dreams, and the imagination. For Gaston Bachelard, reverie is not idle daydreaming but a fundamental and profoundly spiritual part of being alive. He roundly criticized mainstream psychologists “who saw imagination being born in children without ever really examining how it dies in ordinary men.”

As a child, I was often lost in reverie, but that didn’t mean just idly hanging out, lost in thought. I was meaningfully engaged in physical action, although not strenuous or stressful. What I was doing was rhythmic, repetitive and meditative — almost like being in a trance.

In one favorite reverie, I was damning up a tiny seasonal stream with sticks and stones, packed tightly together with the same sticky mud I was standing in. The project was completed when a small still pond spread out behind my dam.

My actions were like repeating a mantra that occupied my brain just enough to stop my thinking mind. Of course, the onrushing spring runoff erased my work overnight, forcing me to start all over again, like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the mountain each day.

According to Jessica Schad Manual, “Stories are embedded into the cultural memory of the fabric of reality — usually tied to the land — and are displayed when these rich connections… converge with a member of the culture.”

In this case, that member of the culture was me.

I still live next to my childhood home, where I spent countless hours daydreaming. My family named the woods next door where I built my dams “The Green Forest” after the magical forest filled with talking animals that sprang from the imagination of Thornton Burgess, the renowned children’s author whose books my parents read to us every night.

Mircea Eliade, one of the most influential scholars of religion in the 20th century, believed in what he called “The Eternal Return,” the notion that we can fuse together the sacred and profane aspects of our lives in our golden years by returning to our childhood origin stories.

I am grateful to have a chance to make that return.

The quiet, reflective pools I formed as a child by cobbling together sticks and stones to hold back the rushing torrents, I now accomplish with my writing: Trapping the tumble of incoming thoughts and encouraging them to coalesce into a reflective pool of an essay.