Last night I dreamt that I was on a highway in the rain at night and I was lost.... Last night I dreamt I was lost on a highway, I made a turn onto another highway and suddenly I knew I was on the right path, the path home..... Last night I dreamt I was on a highway in the rain and I was cold and soaking wet.... Last night I dreamt I was on a highway in the rain on my bicycle....Last night I dreamt that I was on my bicycle at night in Michigan, and that I had been riding my bicycle across the country from California..... Last night I dreamt that I had been traveling aimlessly, vaguely headed in the right direction (east), but without a known path I had wandered slightly astray.... Last night I dreamt that although I had perhaps floundered, I had, in fact, found the route home.
Dreams are, of course, often not linear, at least mine aren't. They are jumpy and scattered, oddly fragmentary and yet at the same time whole. Increasingly I tend to view life the same way, although sometimes I wonder if I have wandered off the generally accepted path and find myself somewhere wilderness.
Last night's dream was not, in many ways surprising. I started one project, the house, that was supposed to go one way, follow one path, and that path has changed and grown and become far more complex than I had wanted. What I had hoped would be three discrete projects over a period of years has turned into something that at times feels like a storm crashing around me, even though in the end I know it will all come together.
So too, my supposed idyll in the apartment. I had hoped this would be a time outside of normal life and obligations. A time to explore creative impulses, to reflect and refine. Well reflection has occurred, although I sometimes feel it has been dragged out of me kicking and screaming. Refinement as well. Nothing is as I had hoped it would be. And yet, I am not worse for this wandering and at times overwhelming path. I may even be better.
The sun is out, for a part of this week anyway. The house is coming along. Stucco is going up on the outside walls. The garage and studio are progressing. We are playing with layouts so that the electrical wiring can go in. Floors and tiles are also starting to be installed in the house. In short things are starting to come together. A new path is being revealed. I may grow lost again, but at the moment promise reigns.
This is true personally as well even though the path has not been as simple or as clear as I had hoped. I should not be surprised at that. If dreams are a form of metaphor which helps us to understand our paths in life, I increasingly feel that life itself is a metaphor, and part of our life's journey is actually a job of deciphering and understanding. We can explore, or refuse to explore, to the best of our ability. I often, and I suspect I am not at all alone in this, want to take the easiest, safest, kindest path. I just want to be content, to have fun, to be happy. And yet each time I am turned upside down I find that my previous understanding of happiness was just a reflection in a mirror, that I have never seen beyond the surface of things.
And so here I am again actually, finding myself heading exactly where I always thought I wanted to be, except that the road to this place was not at all what I expected, nor is the place itself quite what I had imagined. Well, I suppose that is not surprising. If life is a metaphor, then the words we use, the understandings we form as we unravel each level, prove inadequate with each layer we manage to peel back. And like any good metaphor, my purpose, my understanding, my meaning, can never be more than a partial view of the whole, and therefore completely different from other's understanding. Different and yet the same because we are all the same matter, all the same energy. All completely alike and completely different.
Quite frankly there are days I think I would have remained much happier had I never fallen into a rabbit hole, had I continued to refuse to delve beneath the surface. I liked my life. It was, by all contemporary social measures, a successful and happy life. Even in the face of grief and loss, I could have clung to that life. Some part of me may wish I had; there would have been less pain, fewer tears. I would not wish it on anyone. And yet at the same time I would, because every time I re-experience joy I see that my former understanding was but a shadow of what joy could be. Make no mistake. I am no wiser. I am just as foolish, just as attached to my own little bits and bobs of this and that as I ever was, even as I realize that they could all disappear tomorrow and the essential fact of who I am, of joy, of sorrow, and also of love, would not change. I am just as lost. In fact the more I think I know where I am going, the more I find I have lost my way.
And yet, I have found my footing yet again. Each time I fall in a hole, I come up simultaneously wanting less and more, being less and more. Who knows what the next blossom will be, or in fact, if it will be at all distinguishable from the blossom that came before. Why blossoms? Well the amaryllis has sent up two more flower stalks, from nothing it appears. I thought the bulbs were spent, done, complete. And yet, new blooms are incontrovertibly present.
