Samain Stent Moon
The dreaming. Elisa told me I’d start remembering dreams during Mercury in retrograde. And, I have.
A recurring theme has shown up, one that’s occurred several times over the last few months. It puzzles me, so I’m going to write about it here, see what writing has to tell me.
The theme, present in several variations, is this. I go somewhere, often to a hotel in a large city, maybe for a conference, maybe for a temporary move. Last night I was somewhere, perhaps a college, but with friends, a new addition to the theme.
I never know the reason but I have moved boxes and boxes of stuff, mostly books, into the rooms I’m occupying. After some time I have to go. But I never seem to have enough time to remove all the stuff I’ve brought, especially the books. I become frantic, trying to find boxes, get stuff moved. In some dreams I worry about the hotel bill, will I be able to pay it if I can’t get my stuff out by the time my reservation is up. Last night I had books scattered over different spaces, but there were friends that offered to help me pack up. Even with the help I felt trapped. I can never get done in time. This is just too hard. Why did I bring so much stuff? The dreams never resolve. They finish with me still running through all the things I need to do to move my stuff. (btw: George Carlin.)
Last night’s addition of friends did lower my anxiety level. I had offers to help pack. A group of African-American street guys offered to move some boxes in the trunks of their cars. Friends at the college, or whatever it was, packed a whole room full of books. Another group had a pick-up truck. Some were going to help me find boxes. It occurred to me for the first time in any of these dreams that I could go to a day labor place and hire folks to help me.
Obvious associations. The move to Colorado. It took weeks to pack all my books, even with eliminating about a third of my library. Each time I’ve moved since college, since 1969, I’ve moved more and more books onto the next place. It can feel overwhelming. And, book boxes are heavy. Each day now I come into the loft and the books are here, on shelves, on stands next to chairs, on desktops, open next to me on the table or the small laptop desk I use for holding things I’m using for writing.
I don’t want to move. Ever again. There’s a threshold effect, one I apparently exceeded in the move out here. I don’t want to do it again. It just feels like too much. And that feeling synchs up pretty well with the feeling I get as these dreams fade. Too much. I can never get done. What can I do?
Another association. The learning of a lifetime. All that knowledge stored in the neurons blinking on and off in my brain. Stuffed full. Like a crowded attic. Can I get any real use from it, crammed in and over abundant as it is? Or, is that the exact question? What if I can’t get any use from all the boxes of knowledge I’ve stored? Even as I write this I feel a slight tension in my abdomen. My feet went up on the chairs legs. Anxiety.
A realization as I wrote. This might be about death, about legacy, about “success.” Have I added so many boxes to my life that I can never use them all before I go home, the home Ram Dass says we’re all walking toward together? Could this be reminding me that check-out time is coming and I’m not done yet. That I need to figure out a way to get done? What would that mean?
I’m open to thoughts on this.
Happy to have some good news to report about Jon. Went to his court date yesterday. His inner attitude seems to be shifting away from anger about the divorce (understandable, but not helpful) toward getting on with his life, accepting the constraints of the restraining order (unreasonable, but legally enforceable, as he just discovered). He wants to get his art in a gallery or up for sale. This is big because it’s a key part of his identity that lay fallow during the twelve years of his marriage. He needs positive reinforcement and he’s had more than his share of negatives over the last few years.
He’s a very talented, smart guy who can handle all the work necessary to remodel his home, replace an axle in his car, ski a great line down an A-basin bowl, teach elementary age kids how to express themselves. I hope he can organize his life so these thing line up, move him forward, and make him feel good about himself.
I’m feeling a bit stressed, a lot going on. Religious school tonight. I’m taking pizza makings and teaching a unit on holidays, especially winter holidays. The kids will reimagine, reconstruct a new winter holiday. Tomorrow morning Kate has two imaging studies, looking for zebras. Tomorrow evening is Gabe’s winter concert in Stapleton. A sequelae of the hearing yesterday is that Jon can’t, for the moment, attend. The old protection order carved out an exception to the 100 yards rule for events with the kids, things like parent-teacher conferences, concerts, doctor visits, but the law is a blunt instrument. Yesterday by default it eliminated those exceptions. Jon wants me to go to represent our side of the family. Important for Gabe. I’ll go.
Got reinforced shortly after the move out here when I had to deal with prostate cancer. That shook me. I worked hard to keep myself upright and maybe, in the process, began to consolidate a lot of learning. A major part of that consolidation came from the support I got from family and friends. Oh. Life can be good, even when it’s bad. Weird. Since the move, it’s been one damned thing after another, or it feels that way right now. Those things forced a going deep, being honest, being grateful a lot. Now, four years later, our move anniversary is the Winter Solstice, my Colorado Self, the one born in the alembic of all those insults, has asserted itself.
Mario is already in town, taking wildfire pictures with his usual acumen, traveling over mountain passes. Tom and Paul fly in today and we’ll have a slow cooker Irish stew up here on Shadow Mountain, all of us. These are friends of well over thirty years, men with whom I shared twice monthly meetings over that time, plus annual retreats. That bond was the toughest thing to leave behind when Kate and I moved out here.
The last letters of the Hebrew alphabet now have renderings in sumi-e, lying on my table ready for quotes and the chop. A member of Beth Evergreen last night referred to me as an artist. Oh. I thought he said audience. Artist is not a word I’ve ever associated with myself so my brain heard something else. A revealing moment. How others see us is not always, perhaps often, not the way we see ourselves.
It was also time to slough off some of the Minnesota based, second phase lingering work. Especially the political. I am going to the caucus this Tuesday; however, I no longer see myself as a dedicated activist. But, and I consider this great news, Ruth told me she was walking out on April 9th, standing outside Mcauliffe, her middle school, for seventeen minutes, one minute for each of the Parkland victims. She’s doing it in spite of the fact that adults tell her no one will listen. Go, Ruth!
The melancholy also uncovered a tension I’d been feeling between leaning in to the domestic, cooking, for example, and Kate and mine’s presence in the Beth Evergreen community, and what I consider my work. Recalibrating second phase expectations about work, which I have not yet fully done, feels like a task for this time. In fact, I enjoy the domestic part of our lives and it feels good to devote more energy to it.
As melancholy begins to lift, where does it go? Does it go back into memory, added to a store of melancholic episodes over a life time, each one different, unique, becoming part of the polyvalent stew that is our psyche? What triggers the end or, better, the gradual tailing off of doubt? Of the heaviness? Of the stasis? Where do all those moods and temporary inner states (and, they’re all temporary) go? Do they just float up into some neuronic cloud, then get washed away through the body’s toxic cleansing processes?
I’m not talking here about depression or anxiety or mania, serious and long lasting mental states; rather, I’m talking about fleeting, sometimes changing moment by moment, atmospherics. Joy. Sadness. Glad. Mad. Eager. Reluctant. Energized. Slow. Crisp or dull. They come and go like the lenticulars over Black Mountain or the high white mare’s tail cirrus. Sometimes they crowd our mind with the darkness of a thunder head or roar through us like a tornado. And then they go, pushed away by a high or low pressure system, perhaps a psychic La Nina.