How Lucky I Was

Last week I had an unusually vivid dream: I had built a house, or somehow one appeared. It was a little like a Victorian row house or a 19th century brownstone house in Brooklyn, but it was the color of pale sand, a desert color. This light ochre facade was decorated like pottery with a distinctive border of black triangles, sort of a Native American detail, and there was a curved bay window in the front.

It was a house that made no sense, but you know how dreams are. It pleased me. I was standing in front of it in the dream, gazing upon it, utterly delighted.

And then it fell down. It simply collapsed and vanished.

I wasn’t so much upset as bewildered. I just stood there for a moment, blinking into the emptiness that had once held a house, not sure what I was feeling.

But then I had two thoughts, clarion clear:

How lucky I was not to have been inside when it collapsed.

and

How lucky I was to have had such a house.

When I think about that dream now, I am sure it contains a message. Maybe the house represents this very one in which I live. Or maybe, judging by its odd fusion of influences, it is a subconscious construction reflecting elements of my whole life: my New York origins, a neighborhood in England where I go to see my family, my habitat here in coastal California…

But I sense an even bigger meaning; I think it says something about how I should approach my life. I indulged myself and described the dream in an email to my poet-friend Dan, who has been a kind mentor and correspondent for a long time. Dan agreed it was a metaphor and he offered further musings: “Transience. The insubstantiality of an independent self. Life. A miracle. A treasure to have, because it is temporary.”

Life keeps showing me this, again and again, but it was interesting to see it inscribed so vividly in a dream.

And then, just a few nights ago, another dream-vignette got snagged inside my head, the kind that stayed with me all day. It was winter, and I was a passenger in the front seat of a car driven by my father or my grandfather. We had just pulled over along a curb in the city and my father/grandfather was bundled up in an overcoat and bracing himself to get out of the car to tend to a quick errand or some work-related transaction. I was to wait for him inside the car, but he was trying to ensure that I was warm enough. He left the heat on and the engine running and he wrapped me in woolen shawls. The windshield was frosty, and I felt a quick rush of icy air as soon as he opened the door to climb out.

I snuggled in the covers, watching his beloved figure hurry along the sidewalk and recede into the cold, and when I woke up suddenly in my real life bed I knew with certainty that this dream was a distilled memory of how I had been loved and cared for. I felt the dream-weight of the many cold days from which I had been shielded, a familiar ache of gratitude and humility landing in its too-late, retrospective way, but it felt like a poem, a poem I carry inside of me but cannot write.

I asked Dan once if his poems ever come from dreams. He told me that he seldom dreams in his sleep, and that the best poems are the one’s in which he finds his way by the light of the poem as he writes it, in the light it casts. He quoted Robert Frost, who said, “I never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.”

I cannot write one, but I live inside a poem. In yesterday’s verse, I walked with a friend to a sculpted rock formation we sometimes call our church. The Gaviota wind was howling, at one point almost knocking me over. But the ocean was shimmering in the distance, and we found a sheltered spot to sit and talk, and then there was a rocket launch, and a sonic boom, and the strangely quiet aftermath when the world holds its breath for an instant and regroups, and everything is normal again, but there’s nothing normal about it.

That evening, we went to a birthday celebration at a fancier-than-our-usual kind of restaurant, and everyone looked radiant and beautiful, but amidst the clatter of plates, the murmur of voices, and a piped-in patchwork of music, news traveled along the table that a mutual friend had died, and our time together became suddenly poignant and all the more precious.

These dreams, these poems, these waking hours…it’s a chronicle of wonder and discovery. The process of writing, even a trivial blog post such as this, helps me to document things I want to remember.

But the bonus is in the discovery, the many realizations unearthed along the way. To refer again to Robert Frost, he said that a poem is a way of saying what it is in search of saying, and that a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. It may not solve everything, but it is at least “a momentary stay against confusion”.

I like that idea: a momentary stay against confusion. And maybe there is refuge within the confusion, in simply acknowledging the uncertainty and ambiguity, the mutability and implausibility, the glimmers and vanishings.

In the light these words cast, my own extravagantly fortunate life is shining, and I am warm with the shawls others placed around my shoulders.

In the light of these words, I understand that a wind will one day lift me and carry me away, and the house in which I dwell will someday come down—but oh, how lucky I have been.