Some Thoughts to Ponder for Saturday: “Truth is like fire; to tell the truth means to glow and burn.” —Gustav Klimt
“Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.” —Rumi
“Your life is not about you; you are about Life. You are an instance of a universal, eternal pattern.” —Richard Rohr
“It’s time for women to stop being politely angry.” —Leymah Gbowee
“Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.” —David Bowie
“We can never be born enough.” —e. e. cummings
“. . .to cry out like Cassandra, but be listened to this time.” —Grace Paley
Aldo Leopold: “Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish [her] right hand and chop off [her] left.”
“Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” —John Muir
“Our time is hungry in spirit. In some unnoticed way we have managed to inflict severe surgery on ourselves. We have separated soul from experience, become utterly taken up with the outside world and allowed the interior life to shrink. Like a stream disappears underground, there remains on the surface only the slightest trickle. When we devote no time to the inner life, we lose the habit of soul. We become accustomed to keeping things at surface level. The deeper questions about who we are and what we are here for visit us less and less. If we allow time for soul, we will come to sense its dark and luminous depth. If we fail to acquaint ourselves with soul, we will remain strangers in our own lives.” —John O’Donohue
“Justice is not negotiable.” —Dr. Denis Mukwege
Gratitude List: 1. Endings and Beginnings 2. Changing up the rhythms 3. Sifting and shifting 4. Word play 5. Sharp cheddar cheese on a bagel.
This is Erebus the Carpet Otter. He looks like he is wearing the Fool’s Cap. He has fangs and a soul patch.
Some Thoughtful Quotations for Today: I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
And wait without love. For love would be love, of the wrong thing.
Yet there is faith. But the faith and the hope and the love, are all in the waiting.
And the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.
—T.S. Elliot
“One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.” —Andrew Wyeth
“There were as many truths—overlapping, stewed together—as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story’s life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.” —Patrick Ness (from The Crane Wife), via Terri Windling
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. “The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. “Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” ―Arundhati Roy (War Talk)
“You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.” ―Vandana Shiva
“It falls to each of us to be those anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy; to embrace the joyous task we’ve been given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours. Because for all our outward differences, we all share the same proud title: Citizen.” — Barack Obama
Gratitude List: 1. Chanteuses. Women who can sing from a stage and make it sound that they are singing from your own heart. 2. Last day of the semester. 3. The music and poetry of Joy Harjo. A student mentioned today that I can get Joy Harjo albums on my apps! 4. The color gold–deeper and wiser, perhaps, than sun or butter yellow. Perhaps a little less fun-loving than those others, but a perfect color for the day. 5. Complexity.
While the saber-rattlers practice their stern faces in mirrors, we gather our children and see the reflections of the eyes of mothers on the other side of endless wars, holding their children to their own hearts.
While the war profiteers add up their numbers, we count too, numbering our young people, knowing that somewhere, in that distant land, other mothers pull sons and daughters away from that red line in the sand, other teachers are doing the math of the beloved scholars ripening to the age of soldier.
We know, as those others know, that collateral damage means someone’s child, someone’s empty arms, someone’s heart torn apart. We know that the men who make war, the maestros who orchestrate the grand drama, are not the ones who do the war, are not the ones who live it.
We know, as the women of Iran know, as the war-makers can never seem to understand, that every casualty has a mother.
Gratitude List: 1. That quiet doe who slipped across the road in yesterday’s headlights, reminding me of shy tenderness, of the need to take great care in all things, to pay attention. 2. The people of Lancaster, standing in the freezing cold, holding up the hope of peace between nations. Young and old, and everyone’s toes like ice, but hearts warm and determined. 3. Doing the last-minute hopeful tweaks on second-semester classes. I love jumping in to second semester, despite the stress of the overlay of first semester’s finish on second semester’s start. Tabula rasa. Anything can be. 4. Last night I heard a story of a former student (before my time here) whose family has recently been reaching out to the school to share how much the school helped to shape–in often quiet and seemingly small respects–the life of their son. I’m grateful for all the ways in which the little things we do for each other open us to deeper connection–in ways we might not always be able to express. 5. The shine of snow-covered landscapes. Winter is not simply dark and drear. Some days, it dazzles!
If you look closely, you will see two faces looking at you.
What Happens When You Get Lost by William Stafford
Out in the mountains nobody gives you anything. And you learn what the rules were after the game is over. By then it is already night and it doesn’t make any difference What anyone else is thinking or doing because now you have to Turn into an Indian. You remember stories and now you know that the tellers were Part of all they told. And everyone else was, and even you. They’re all around you now, but if you’re afraid you will never find them. And those questions that people always ask― “What would you do if…” They have their own answer right now―nothing. Some things cannot be redeemed in a hurry no matter what the intentions are. What could be done had to have been done a long time ago. Because mistakes have consequences that do not just disappear. If evil could be canceled easily it would not be very evil. And so, the stars see you. While you drift away they have their own courses and they watch you. And listen, they already know your name.
In last night’s dream, I am lost again. Only this time, the people who rescued me in the previous dream are the ones I am trying to find. I can’t find everything I need to pack and take with me to see these friends. It’s almost time to meet them, and I haven’t even left the motel, and it’s at least an hour’s drive.
Finally, I am on my way, but I haven’t found the destination on Google Maps, and I can’t seem to figure out how to text my friends to get the address or to tell them I am late. I have four different devices, and I just can’t seem to figure out which one is the phone. I stop a woman and ask if she can help me. She gets out a stylus and starts doing some elaborate calligraphy on one device that looks like an iPad, only it makes actual marks on the surface of the glass. Now she’s just playing a game on the device. I take it from her in disgust, and move on.
I finally pull out my phone and start to text my friend, but the whole systems goes glitchy and starts to blink. The glass of the phone shatters.
I don’t know how I eventually get there, but eventually (it feels like I’m dreaming this hours and many stories after the first) I am sitting with my friends, and it’s actually earlier than the time I was trying to leave in the first dream. I have made it, and I have time. One of my friends remarks that time sometimes seems to stand still when you’re with people you love.
Gratitude List: 1. A Two-Hour Delay. I am going to go back to sleep for a little while. 2. A warm cat stretched out next to me and purring. 3. The quiet beauty of snow, how snow blankets, how it veils. 4. Finding the breathing spaces 5. Getting lost in stories. I love when all three kids are along on the way to and/or from school, because then we listen to story together.
May we walk in Beauty!
Some Things to Think About:
I see her walking on a path through a pathless forest or a maze, a labyrinth. As she walks, she spins and the fine threads fall behind her following her way, telling where she is going, telling where she has gone. Telling the story. The line, the thread of voice, the sentences saying the way. —Ursula K. Le Guin (from “The Writer On, and At, Her Work”)
“Young people, don’t be afraid.” —Michelle Obama in her final speech as First Lady
“You loose your grip and then you slip into the Masterpiece…” —Leonard Cohen
“Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality-not as we expect it to be but as it is-is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.” ―Frederick Buechner
Toko-pa, quoting and reflecting on Marion Woodman: “Marion Woodman—Jungian, author, teacher, crone—taught me that what is most missing from our culture is the Mature Feminine. Mature Feminine, she says, is the ability to ‘hold presence.’ It is not divided attention, like the sort you feel when someone is psychically composing their grocery instead of listening to you. ‘I don’t have time for that,’ she says. Holding Presence ‘is to love the other exactly as they are, not as you want them to be.’ It is love without judging, without getting the other tangled up in your own unconscious, unlived life. ‘Holding presence is to create room so the other can grow into their destiny. They can feel that.'”
“Becoming a mother makes you the mother of all children. From now on each wounded, abandoned, frightened child is yours. You live in the suffering mothers of every race and creed and weep with them. You long to comfort all who are desolate.” ―Charlotte Gray
“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.” —President Franklin Roosevelt
“A condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything…” —T.S. Elliot
“There are years that ask questions, and years that answer.” —Zora Neale Hurston
I see her walking on a path through a pathless forest or a maze, a labyrinth. As she walks, she spins and the fine threads fall behind her following her way, telling where she is going, telling where she has gone. Telling the story. The line, the thread of voice, the sentences saying the way. —Ursula K. Le Guin (from “The Writer On, and At, Her Work)
Gratitude List: 1. Renewing and resetting. Re-starting and re-creating. 2. Tides turn and shift. People pause and look up, rub their eyes and shake their heads, and wonder if they’ve been dreaming. Then they wake up and get to work. This is the vision I am holding right now for the people of my country. 3. Synchronicity. Last night, I decided to try to make some shifts in my daily habits, in order to create a new balance for myself. Later, I pulled a random card from one of my meditative decks, and it was Balance. Of course it was. 4. Bread and soup for supper. Jon stopped on the way home and bought a sourdough baguette and a creamy shrimp chowder. Simple and yummy. 5. The Susquehanna River. I get to cross it twice a day, to note its moods and colors and shine.
Aha! The light is here. We have found our way by star and by dream, by following the song inside us.
Now we face a terrible choice. A new dream asks us to stand against a great evil that threatens to destroy this promise, that will destroy the lives of many children and their families until all is said and done. But we are used to following the paths where our dreams take us, and so we must see the child on his way, pack up our things, and head out another way, tricking the old king of his quarry.
Legends say that the astrologers and seers who followed the star in search of the child of promise came from Persia. At least some of them probably came from Iran. Rumi’s beloved Shams was from the city of Tabriz, in Iran, and my own beloved Hafez was from the city of Shiraz, Iran, where the Nasir Ol-Mulk–the Rainbow Mosque–is located today.
As my own country is crouched on the brink of a war with Iran, a rogue president at the helm and all semblance of Congressional checks and balances seemingly in tatters, we must consider our own response to despotic and ruthless leadership. How will we find a different way out of the murderous city? How will we protect the small ones? Perhaps today calls not for a quiet exit through the back door, but a conscious and public standing up and speaking out.
The people of Iran are not our enemy. We have, perhaps, more in common with them than with the angry old men who plot war between our countries.
What do your dreams tell you? Where will this star lead us today?
La Befana: The Epiphany Witch
She’d got her eyes fixed on what was right in front of her, the dust and the dirt and the everyday mess. Wanted to be ready for the coming of the child but couldn’t see beyond the day she was in.
Believe me, I know what the old one was up to. I too get caught by the fishhook of the present, stuck in the nextness of each task ahead, forget to lift my eyes to see the shine and sparkle of my arriving guests, can’t put down my broom, my pen, my daily rhythm, to look up and outward.
Like Old Befana, I catch, too late, the jingle of the caravan bells as they turn the corner in the distance, see the disappearing cloud of dust.
Hastening to grab my cloak and bag, I’ve lost their trail before I reach the distant corner, left behind, bereft, alone, dust-covered, traveling bag in one hand and besom in the other, destined to spend my life sweeping the skies on my broom, chasing down the Holy Aha.
Gratitude List: 1. Dreams and visions 2. Watching a boy and his grandparents yesterday, putting together a giant Lego jet. Hearing him hum and whistle as he concentrated. 3. All the people who are standing up and speaking out. 4. All those crows! On the way home last night, as we were driving beneath a sunset sky full of crows, a boy began to sing, “Magical, magical, magical.” (Of course, when he noticed me appreciating it, he switched and sang, “Unmagical, unmagical, unmagical,” but it was too late. I had noticed.) 5. The holy Aha! Finding the way by starlight and dream. Choosing to disobey, if that what is called for.
One of the subjects that keeps snagging my poetic attention is the landscape manuscript–how everything around us (not just the landscape) has a “text” that we might understand, if only we could read it. When I’m driving down the road and thinking about a knotty issue I am trying to resolve and I see three crows standing quietly in a winter field, or seven geese suddenly fly overhead in a raggedy V across my view, or something in the way the sun shines on the remaining leaves of that old oak seems to have a message for me–it’s as if there’s a deep text in the world that could be understood if only I knew the letters. And of course the landscape does have messages, and they can be read. It’s what farmers and meteorologists and hikers have done forever. It is what ecologists and environmentalists are doing right now, to save our lives.
And sometimes the visual and aural messages in my environment do seem to align themselves in perfect messages that feel like they’re meant for me, specifically, to read. Again, this is whimsical and playful rather than scientific. And it also captures my attention. I’m not going to make a judgement about whether or not the Holy One Herself, or the Universe, or the faeries, set up yesterday’s little alignment just so my heart could see it, but I will claim the whimsy, say that the synchronicity caught my heart, and then I will use it to construct the next steps of intuitive meaning for the shape my ponderings take in the coming days. I’d rather step into the future making meaning from the rich webs of whimsy and coincidence that surround me than refusing to gather the symbols that dance through my life and live with meaning defined only by the hardest of logic.
I was driving across the Route 30 bridge, listening to the most recent episode of “This Jungian Life” podcast, on the Trickster archetype, because my friend had recommended it to me. I was thinking about the Fool, and how I hoped that this archetype would inform my activism in the coming year, speaking truth through the lies in the way only the Fool can. The theme of the podcast suddenly turned to the way that tricksters throughout history have been challengers of suppression and repression and autocratic rule, how they act as a corrective when a person or a system becomes too rigidly rule-based and oppressive. There was a “click” in my brain at the coincidence of thought and outer message.
At that moment, my eye caught the new Sight and Sound billboard at the end of the bridge—shining purple, it advertised their upcoming production of Queen Esther, and one of my favorite Bible phrases, from the book of Esther, took up the central space in large letters: “FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS.” Again, an internal click.
As I passed the billboard, a large vulture swooped low above the highway. Click.
Yes, it’s whimsy and intuition, poetry and dreaminess, rather than hard science or pure logic or cold reason. While I need the latter, while I value science and logic and reason as important mental processes, I think a world that makes meaning without the more poetic processes is bereft of the spark of spirit.
And so it is settled, this day before Epiphany. My word, my archetype, my guiding principle, for the coming year is the Fool. Sacred clown. Jester. Trickster. I’ve been considering how the Fool subverts the dominant paradigm (to use an old phrase) to speak the truth behind the lies. In a political milieu swimming in falsehoods, how does the Fool speak truth? Lear’s Fool spoke from deep love and tenderness, was not afraid to speak harsh truths right to the king’s face, and kept repeating the truth from various angles until the truth shone in.
Even the travelers whose arrival we celebrate today and tomorrow, the Wise Ones, the magi, have an element of the Fool. Magi, Mages, Magic, Image, Imagination. The truth they first told Herod was too bald, too open, too dangerous, and so, when they were presented with the deep truth of this Child, they disobeyed the king and fled home a different way, tricking the King. Still, the consequences were grave and terrible for too baldly proclaiming the truth to the king in the first place. This is lesson to be deeply conscious of to whom and how the truth is presented. The Fool must be wise.
So. The Fool. Those black vulture wings are also in my consciousness. And the echidna, a hybrid creature who survives and thrives because it is more than one thing. Those mists and rainbows, veiling and shattering, scattering light. Wading in the water: Do you want to be well? And Aslan’s words to Lucy: “Courage, Dear Heart!”
There is one more thing, a more abstract word rather than an archetype: Orenda. It comes from the Iroquoian language systems, and it refers to the spiritual power that exists in all things, the energy that we transmit between us, that we can access to change the world.
Okay, and there’s one more thing. My friends. Community. Last night’s dreams were a succession of anxiety dreams. In several scenes, I was trying to find Joss, and just couldn’t make contact. In several scenes, I had little fiddly school details to remember and take care of while I was rushing around trying to do other things. In several scenes I was in a car, constantly missing my exit, needing to turn around, but unable to get around another car or to fit my car into the space of the turn-off. Finally, standing on a sidewalk, about to throw my phone on the ground because I couldn’t get it to make a simple call to Joss, a group of my college friends walked up. Nancy took my phone and got it to dial Joss. Gloria put her hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes, and started to tell me a helpful story. The others gathered around. I could feel everyone’s presence. And I calmed down. Friends. I get by with a little help. . .
What are your messages from the coming year? What words and images coalesce for you? What synchronicities in your inner and outer landscape call to you to listen and follow?
Gratitude List: 1. Friends. How even in my dreams, my beloveds appeared to bring me peace. You. The little connections that are bigger than you know. The way the web of our connections holds us up, and holds the world. 2. The spiritual force within each one of us that enlivens and enlightens and helps us to bring change and goodness into the world. 3. Synchronicity and coincidence and making meaning where it comes. 4. Image and imagination and magic. 5. Being greeted throughout the day by cats.
I am grateful for deep, deep sleep during this Twelvenight. How blessed it is to rest well and soundly.
The consequence, of course, is that I do not remember my dreams, except as impressions, or fleeting images. Last night when I went to sleep, I asked for a word to come to me in the night. I would like a word to contemplate in the coming year, and I was hoping that the deep-self Fool might cast one up out of a dream as it sometimes does.
This morning I woke up not with a word or a narrative or images, but with a sense of the small standing up to the big, pushing back the tide of largeness that threatens to overwhelm the tiny.
Of course my subconscious would toss me such a morsel after yesterday’s meander with anxious demons. This potential for war with Iran has me panicky and anxious. I think I am managing the worry, mostly, but it takes a lot of deep intention and careful breathing. Of looking for news and analysis. Of ignoring news and analysis. Of connecting with others who believe that the people must stand up and say that we do not want war, that we have no quibble with the people of Iran and Iraq, that we want peace for our children and for the children of Iran. That the big powers must not have the last word about the world where the small ones will live.
And so the message of the morning is of the small ones pushing back the big ones. This coming week, Women in Black, a local Lancaster group connected to a worldwide peace movement, will stand silently on our courthouse steps with signs expressing our desire for peace. We may read Iranian poetry. We may weep. We may simply stand silently, as women have stood for decades, for centuries perhaps, in the public square, to tell the powers that be that we do not sanction sending the young ones to die in old men’s wars.
Then we will walk down the block to join in a larger community protest against war with Iran.
They will tell you that you are unrealistic. They will tell you that you do not understand. They will tell you that we must kill before we are killed. They will tell you that world affairs are for the patriarchs to decide. They will tell you to go back to the hearth and the kitchen and the children. And then they will take those children and turn them into machines for their wars. And we must be ready to stand between them and our children. A flowing river of women, of grandmothers, of sane men, too, standing between the powers of the angry old men and the children of the US and Iran. Take my hand. Hold the line.
Gratitude List: 1. The women, and men too, who are pledging to be Love in the face of hatred and war. 2. Despite appearances to the contrary, reason and humanity do often prevail against the powers of the angry old men. 3. Interspecies relationships. I love waking up curled into a ball with a small creature tucked into the circle of me and purring. 4. The poetry of Rumi and Hafez, from Persia, modern-day Iran. And for the poetry of modern Iranian poets. Yesterday afternoon, I read poems by Forough Farrokhzad. 5. Morning mist is magical.
I have absolutely no recollection of dreaming last night. The door between sleeping brain and waking brain is shut tightly. No narratives or images come from that world into this today.
This morning when I looked out the window at 5:35, the darkness was touched by a hint of grey. Dawn is slipping slowly and silently back the clock. Light returns.
The quotation in the image I attached above is from William Butler Yeats’ poem, “Fergus and the Druid.” Fergus the King has relinquished his crown and abdicated his responsibilities as king, and he asks the Druid to teach him knowledge, to give him wisdom. Finally, after a little bit of back-and-forth, the Druid offers Fergus a bag of dreams. Though I put the words with the Fool, the Druid is much more earnest than the Fool, more shamanic, seeking wisdom in all things, pursuing knowledge. The Fool just trusts that the wisdom necessary for the moment will arrive when it comes. The Fool is both younger and older than the Druid, more foolish, and wiser.
Going back to school yesterday meant a different kind of mental focus, put me in more of a Druid zone, seeking knowledge with deep intention. But of course Teacher is an archetype of its own, the one who passes on knowledge and wisdom, seeking it like the Druid, drawing it out of the people themselves, helping them to find it. Druid, Teacher, Queen/King/Ruler, Fool: We are so many people at once, aren’t we?
On a morning when the dream-door is closed, still I carry with me the bag of dreams I have been dreaming. Today, they wrap me round as I go out again, stepping out as the Fool, the Druid, the Teacher, carrying my little bag–of dreams, of wisdom, of story. May your own dreams feed you and wrap you round.
Gratitude List: 1. Pie. Yesterday was pie day in the faculty lounge. One of my colleagues is a masterful pie-maker. Once a year, he brings eight or ten pies for us to sample. It’s the best snack day of the year, and it made yesterday a celebration instead of a foggy slog. 2. My shiny students. Many of them were as tired as I was. So many of them just want to be done with the semester already. Me, too. But there’s joy and hope and community there, too, and for some students, school is the safe place, the belonging place. I am grateful that school can be that haven for those who need it. 3. Yesterday’s chapel speaker. It was mostly a personal introduction for a member of our school community, but he was engaging and lively. He caught students’ attention on the first day back from break. He made us laugh, he made us think. 4. Resolutions and intentions. I know all the reasons to be cynical about New Year’s Resolutions, but here’s the thing. New Year’s Day can be like the moon, and I can use the gravity of this day to help boost my energy as I create an intention. I have been wanting to maintain a higher daily step-count, but I sometimes I need the extra artificial push of a New Year’s Resolution or an outside challenge to motivate me. Here’s to the attempt! 5. Dawn is inching back the clock. Day is slowly lengthening.
The work-world isn’t waiting for me to finish my Twelvenight ruminations. School starts again this morning. So my writing may, of necessity, be shorter.
Yesterday, I sort of dismissed my dream as the anxious eruption of school into my sleep-psyche. I set that little echidna to the side in my considerations of meaning. But it kept snuffling into my awareness throughout the morning. It felt odd to me that I would dream such a little-known creature. Josiah and I had read about them last year when he was doing a report on the platypus–echidna and platypus are cousins–but I haven’t thought about them since.
There are all those articles that keep popping up about the massive losses of animal life in the Australian fires. I had been thinking sadly of kangaroos and quokkas and wombats and koalas, but echidnas hadn’t crossed my mind. Why was I dreaming an echidna?
I mentioned the dream on Facebook, and a friend said that he, too, has been having Australia dreams, and I wonder: When the Earth is hurting, do we feel it in our dreams? Are we dreaming our own deep-self messages as well as picking up signals from the Beings around us? It’s a whimsical thought, and perhaps ought to be the organizing concept of a novel or short story, at least. But whether or not it’s a message from Earth herself, it draws my attention to the terrible loss on the other side of the world and gives me another connection to that world that I know so little of.
My friend said that he is planning to try to find the characters in his Australia dreams and ask them to tell him more. So I tried to find my way back to the echidna last night. I saw her just as I was falling asleep. A larger echidna came along and stomped on her neck. I managed to pull the larger one off, and save the little one, but then the dream was over. If that was a further message, it’s pretty traumatic. Sigh.
I have been doing some thinking about echidnas in the last day, how they have a hybrid sensibility to them: mammals who lay eggs, hedgehog/anteater/birds. They’re sort of not quite one thing or another, but wholly themselves. And their back feet seem to be on backwards. They can burrow backward with their powerful hind claws, which face behind them. The echidna is feeling like a perfect animal symbol for me to walk with this coming year. During the past four or five years, the tension has been building for me, the feeling that I am both teacher and writer and not quite either one, really. It’s hard to hold onto these two identities which demand so much of my time and brainwork. Perhaps the echidna is my message that this year is to be one of problem-solving, really figuring out how to be this hybrid creature that I seem to have become.
Last night’s dream: I need to go to Harrisburg for a meeting. I leave at 5:30 in the morning, and I am taking my little blue Festiva. It’s been so long since I have driven it that I can’t seem to adjust the height and angle of the seat and mirrors. I stop at a convenience store for coffee and batteries. I need three AA and three AAA for my Walkman. It’s really hard for me to get help getting what I need. People are busy and distracted.
The meeting is at the convenience store, so I sit down with my styrofoam cup of hot chocolate (where’s the coffee?) while someone is getting my batteries. We talk about the boss, who is corrupt, and is using his position at the store to enrich himself. He loves roller coasters, so he has built a small theme park with several special roller coasters that he can ride. We vote that the woman next to me will write a letter of complaint. The meeting is over, and I start to drive home.
It’s easy to see how several pieces of this are basic anxiety-dream elements. Before I went to bed, I worried that for some reason my watch alarm might not wake me up at 5:30. Do I have everything I need to make it through these two days of school? Can I fit myself back into the driver’s seat? My own particular work bosses are extremely ethical and generous, but the “boss” of my country seems to be enriching himself and satisfying his whims at taxpayer’s expense, and that has occupied a great deal of my mental energy in the past few years.
I seem to need a lot of batteries, and coffee/chocolate, to keep me going. I ought to spend some more time working out how to best use and renew my energy. I ought to be using rechargeable batteries by now, anyway. And where was my reusable mug? I was rushing and anxious, and so I was not managing my resources very well. Slow down and savor, I think I told myself a day or so ago. Slow down and find the resources I need instead of frittering away with non-renewable energy sources. There’s a pretty serious message for someone who walks the borderlands of exhaustion.
Gratitude List: 1. The messages in the most mundane anxiety dreams. 2. Echidnas. What an odd and lovely dream-animal to get to know. 3. I didn’t get it all done, but I got a LOT done, and that’s something. 4. As reluctant as I am to get back to work, I am eager to see my school-people again. They give me energy. I do love being a teacher. 5. This is only a two-day week, after all. I can do two days. In fact, as much as I grumbled about going back today rather than Monday, I think there’s something to be said for starting with a short week.
Mockingbird Chronicles 