Awestruck
It was a night of colorful dreaming. My trusty bicycle was somehow run over by a truck and lay bent and broken on the ground, but Monte picked it up and straightened it out, and then for some reason my old friend Teresa appeared. (That's the two of us above, taking a break after a mountain bike ride back in 1983.) Anyway, Teresa handed me a yellow cardigan sweater and urged me to continue my ride. I also met Barack Obama in this dream, and that was a treat, but I was distracted by a cloud of bumblebees hovering above our heads whose hum had turned into high-pitched human speech, and I was sure they had a lot to say.
Later I told the real Teresa about the part of the dream in which she appeared, and she promptly looked up the color of the chakra yellow and told me that it relates to pearls of wisdom, well-being, and clarity, which sounded good to me. She also sent me loving thoughts and advice, all of which reminded me what a sunny-natured and filled-with-light person she is and always has been, and that too seems yellow, and I figured that this particular dream episode was telling me that there are loving people who would help me through even if I was broken. (As for Barack Obama and the bumblebees abuzz with human voices, well, it at least it feels like something hopeful. )Recently it occurred to me that if one dreams subconsciously and then consciously thinks about those dreams later, isn’t it possible that the interpretations one attributes to them were already embedded in the original dream? It seems that whatever I later think my dream meant is valid. It’s the same me…right? So I'm going with the love and hopefulness.
On a personal note (and let’s face it, that’s the primary note I play in this blog) my upcoming surgery, otherwise known as The Grand Opening, has already had an effect on me. Obviously it imparts a heightened sense of vulnerability and anxiety, but there are also some good things. I feel extremely “woke”, more tuned into life and the preciousness of every day. Colors are so vivid, light is so bright, friendships so dear. And people I have loved, even the ones that are gone, feel very present in my heart.The other day I heard a podcast interview with a guy who has written a book on trump. Near the conclusion of the interview, he said to picture driving on the road late at night and you’re beginning to doze off, and suddenly the lights of a speeding, oncoming truck jolt you awake and you steer away at the last moment, and that adrenalin shock is what gets you home safely. Maybe trump, he says, is that speeding truck coming at us, undermining our democracy and threatening all we care about, and maybe the adrenalin will snap us awake and we’ll manage to steer away and drive home again. (Yeah, this is what’s served up as optimism right now.)
And maybe it's a little like The Grand Opening. Well, no, it’s not the same….only in that a scary thing, in this case, the prospect of having my head cut open, to put it dramatically but accurately, seems to have jolted me awake and charged me up.I’m charged up by wonders too, like getting up in the darkness of pre-dawn to watch the blood moon earlier this week, seeing that strange lunar eclipse before the moon sank down below the hill. And even apart from that magnificent orange orb, there were stars, so clear and bright, shimmering and twinkling. I stood beneath the great cathedral of the heavens, awestruck.And today is Groundhog Day, midway point between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox, and the anniversary of the day I first rode into California, thirty-six years ago. It is an astonishing gift to be here, and I don't know whether to respond to that knowledge with a sense of urgency or stillness. But I'm going for a bike ride right now.
