She tried several dreams earlier in the week, when she first
sensed what was happening, but I didn’t catch on to the fact that it was her. This
time she appeared as herself. She started with the house as a metaphor. It wasn’t
a house we had ever owned in real life, but rather, it was the dream house we’d
built from bits and clips of shows on HGTV. A bedroom like that, a living room
like this, a double oven, beautiful craftsmen woodwork, a Victorian façade… we
were arguing over the thermostat.
My brother was a
child in the background and I told her we were cold, playing on her sympathies toward
my younger sibling. We can’t afford it, she insisted. I gestured at the house.
We can afford it. We can survive in the cold but that isn’t the point: we’re
cold. She switched tactics. There was suddenly a flood coming, rushing over a
wall in the back garden, stream toward the house. We have to save the house. I
make sandbags nearby but I don’t lift them. I make other people to lift them
for me, to place them for me. I have an army of people and she realizes the
flood isn’t a real concern anymore.
The water stops suddenly and she bursts into tears standing
before the half finished wall of sandbags. I offer to keep building the wall,
to protect against future floods, but I sense that I am missing the point. I
just want to protect the house we built, she says. Suddenly he steps out of the
crowd. I did not make him. He is the magician I remember from another dream,
but not a magician this time. His face is handsome, his demeanor its usual
forceful variety of caring. He takes her face in his hands and somehow, does
the same to me simultaneously.
“I will protect this house,” he says, “there is no fear for
you to keep. This is too important to destroy.”
He looks at me when he says the last bit. Suddenly I
understand and I awaken.
----
I felt the rumblings
a long time ago and the earth broke beneath my feet just before the majority of
my online presence suddenly went dark. In some ways it was good timing, since
many members on the east coast went literally dark and I doubt I was much
missed in all the commotion. But for those who noticed or worried when I stopped
showing up to chats and started posting only minimal updates to this blog, take
heart for I am not gone. Nor have I grown disinterested. It’s not the first
time this has happened and, I will be honest with you, it won’t be the last.
My kitchen is piled with dishes that have been sitting in
the sink for over a week. I’ve resorted to paper products and microwave food in
place of normal cooking because it takes fewer precious seconds from my task. A
task which would disturb anyone living with me if I weren’t alone because it largely
involves staring at a wall. Dust gathers on everything that matters to me:
altars, studio workbenches, videogame systems, even my shiny new card decks.
But there is a well worn spot on the couch and a thin binder filled with mad scribblings
which proves that some kind of work has taken place.
The wheel clicks around and the Tower card falls before me
once again. My behavior becomes a bit erratic in a way that is noticeable even
to colleagues and others who do not have frequent personal contact with me. I
erupt to sudden fits of poetry at work. One student watched me write with
fascination, ignoring her own credit recovery work, and regarded my hand moving
furiously across a notebook page with a sort of bemused reverence. In general,
the children notice something different about me and give me space.
At home my mind erupts in the late night hours. I devour
articles and buy more books than I can afford. I drain the power meter on my
e-book reader repeatedly. I reframe and shift paradigms and, still unsatisfied,
I dig deep toward the roots of the problem. It is tucked against the foundation,
I realize, and then the bricks come tumbling down as the tower shudders and
collapses around me. I would cry but I am too deeply engaged to pause for
tears.
Since she can speak to me now in dreams without having to
play the role of a dying woman, my mother appears when I sleep. She is
concerned about what she sees happening. When she was alive, I largely concealed these
episodes from her. She did not ever witness the cruel fires in the crucible of
my mind because it is not something that can be easily seen from the outside.
It alarms her, to see me engage in willful and wonton destruction of everything
I am. Since she has never seen the process before, she does not know that
repairing something at the foundational level means stripping down to it—
violently if need be. She is afraid because she does not know that I will
emerge from this as a stronger person. She sees only the pain and visceral disembowelment of the personage she
has watched me spend several years building, she sees only the utter disintegration
of the woman she helped me become.
Set knows better.
He has guided me through this process before. He is confident
in my skills. So in my dream, He steps out from the background of my being (where
I sometimes forget He dwells) to reassure my mother—yes, He will watch and see
that I do it right. He will watch and see that the tower is ultimately rebuilt
and rebuilt well. I am important to Him. But because I am important to Him, He
helps me initiate this turmoil, because this breaking down, this clearing to
the foundation…it is necessary. It is necessary so that I may continue to do His
work in this world. It is a normal thing for me at this point and I trust in Him
and the in the methods He has taught me for doing this efficiently and well,
but I see now how frightening it must be to my mother who does not know or
trust him. The reformation of self is very close in appearance to insanity,
very close in nature to uncreation. There is a crucial difference, but it takes
practice and experience to know where the line is between the two.
And as I recognize her fear and join my patron in comforting
her, I suddenly realize how disconcerting my sudden absence may be to the new communities
of which I am a part.
No fears: Set just took me offline for a firmware upgrade is
all. ;) I am well and I will return shortly.
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