Thinking About Dreaming
on letting go and sitting still
It’s a slow morning, though I’ve begged for it not to be. I folded myself a dozen ways, trying to wake, until I just couldn’t get up and fell back asleep. The oats on stovetop, the warmed sweetened masala chai, the re-centering again would all have to wait.
I cannot sit still long enough for anything good to happen to me. Instead, I am a like a frog in that children’s game, leaping over one thing to the next. When I am lucky, I catch myself doing this silly leaping—pretending everything is important—and I have to say, out loud, Slow down Jo!
Sometimes I am sitting and this is what I call dreaming. In dreaming world, you can extend dreams into the veins of morning. It’s a spell that breaks earlier in the day. Children’s lives are spent so much in this dreaming state, this pinch-me-am-I-real state. I wonder if their spell is never breaking.
I’m not trying to convince you of mornings, or anything really, as that has never been my job here. I don’t know what my job is, but I find myself telling people I am a writer or that I am a farmer or that I love being with children. Which I haven’t made any of those things into any profession whatsoever, though many people miss the point of that. My job, which earns me things in many other ways than money, is to love and make sense of things—while also letting the great mystery of life fall down, like walls, as we receive gift after gift of consciousness. If we’re lucky to receive. And that is probably many of our jobs here on earth.
I have dreams these days, like I was telling you before I had to insert my disclaimer of knowing anything. (Which, disclaimer inserted, I believe none of us can truly know anything. We run into so much trouble here. A few of my close friends wondered the other day, what is a ‘right’ opinion? We decided that, maybe, eating breakfast is a good opinion to have. Maybe. That was all that we came up with and please let me know if you have any more, in the grace of potentially being wrong.)
Dreams. In them I am never anxiously leaping or struck with the seriousness of life or sucked into a digital world. Instead, there is healing, and I’ve come to believe that they are gifts, our transportation to death each night, which encompasses every breath of life into an immortal page of being. I guess, what I’m saying, is dreams do not let go of relationships or love or our deepest pain. They cut deep. They are as important as our ant trail on the map of waking life. They have become crucial to me in these weeks letting go of loss, letting the physical body of Anna go and knowing that she is here in ways I don’t fully know.
There is death everywhere I look. The leaves on the ground, the dead bird outside my window—which I had actually recently speculated that birds have been getting smarter due to the decreasing amount of birds I have seen lying underneath a window, but I was wrong—and flies sneaking into the house as the cooler air comes in. I have been dealing with death anxiety, fear of the cycles of life. Even the last of my peanut butter from the co-op in Eugene brings an ending, as silly as it is. And there I am leaping again, even in my brain: Why am I here? I miss Oregon.
I don’t have to be content. I don’t have to stop leaping. In fact, if I try to do those things, I bet I’ll be more confused. In all of this dying, I’ve been forced to love what I have. Not that I didn’t love it before, but it is here despite trying. It is in the love I have for Anna, which continues in everything else. It is the love I have for the mountains, which doesn’t have to turn into a wish or desire for where I am not, but gratitude and appreciation. Ah, it is a slow turning, this sitting. But all that I’m saying, and you don’t have to agree, is that dreams are magical portals of our desires turned into being. When we admire these desires instead of grasping them, we can let them go. And in the morning? We can wake and make sense of it, or not make sense of it. It would all be the same either way.
With lots of love,
Jo
