a dream

i have just had a dream. not of my usual sort by any means. i do not have dreams like this one. i rarely dream, and when i do the nits that remain with me upon waking are hazy. foggy. indeterminate. on the rare occasions when i remember anything with any clarity it is usually of the brain dump sort - like when a computer's hard drive that has become overfull and various unrelated files must be purged. these clear dreams are like that recycle bin: a twisted and jumbled nonsensical mess. but not tonight. tonight there was connection. and tonight i was not fully asleep. tonight i had a waking dream which i can remember as though it were happening to me now.

i am alone, on a pilgrimage of a sort. i do not know exactly why, beyond that i have dreamed for years of coming here, but i am come to lumbini in nepal. birthplace of siddhartha gautama, he would become the buddha. i am not here religiously, at least not in the strictest meaning. i am not here to find myself. i am not here for enlightenment, i am not here to worship. yet i am here all the same.

i have come at a good time. the hills are full, the bodhi tree connected fully to surrounding landscape with cords that bear countless prayer flags. their colors are myriad, their shapes shift and play like the dancers i left in the clubs of kathmandu. there is a difference, and yet a sameness - while their reason for being here is so separate from those dancers, their nature is so very much the same: dissolution, oneness, connection, celebration, impermanence. i feel the colors physically, shocking me against a sky as blue as any i have ever seen, lush grasses and tree-lines hills thrusting their greens up into the blues almost as if to make the reds and yellows and oranges of the flags all the more wondrous.

this is a holy place, someplace i can touch without touching. there is something special here. moreso than just another simple place of worship. i am a white face here, a kind that is not seen terribly infrequently but seemingly greeted with some understandable measure of doubt as to the honesty of the visit. the faces i see are brown, lovely reddish and yellows and weathered to a point not often experienced in our cities. i am of little concern to the faces, white face or no. i am but another part of the landscape, another warp or weft in reality's fabric for this moment. this is an altogether novel experience for me; i am not being viewed with indifference, but with recognition and a lack of concern. i am not being overlooked, i am being seen with eyes that understand that my presence has little bearing on their experience but must be honored all the same.

i come to the tree. not a tree, but *the* tree. this is the focal point, the reason they are here. i can feel this too. the colors come rushing to me suddenly, the songs and breaths and breezes and prayers descending as i descend to my knees to pay some respect to this place. i have no plans nor expectations of anything momentous, not even of anything special at all. but as i come to my knees i can feel something crack inside of me, moses rock smacked with his staff and flowing blood and water in the depths of whatever it is that is me. this is a beautiful sound to me, and peaceful and quietly thunderous roar, and a new softness grows wildly from a strange spot in the middle of me.

and then it comes. a single, beautiful tear. there is no outpouring, no deluge. one small tear, which wends its way to my eye and finds itself balanced at the base of my nose. and it falls. i see it drop, each inch traveled toward the ground a lifetime. and when it finds the soil, it simply disappears into it with no apparent effect.

but i hear another drop hit. it is not my tear. i hear another. others have joined me in my small outpouring. the tears begin to come together in a pattering, quietly enough to be unmistakable for what they are but still loud enough to be heard. and then comes a larger drop. and another. these are not tears of the congregants. this is rain, the cool and bracing kind. the kind that is mostly unseen here.

our tears gather together with the coming rain and soon the skies have opened in a torrent to join with our own crying, and i rear back on my knees, fingers buried in the soil at my knees and i wail. for the first time in years i wail, and the whole of nature wails alongside me. the ground around smells of life and ashes, the winds of beginnings and ends, and i am with them and of them.

we wait, and we cry. and the clouds open apart and there comes a sunshine the warming likes of which i have never seen. from the spot where my first tear touched grows a shoot of purest green. i raise myself to my feet, gather my senses and turn to leave. i do not need to see this flower. it is enough to know that it grows.

i see things

before any one of the apparent 2 people who read this calls the men in white coats on me again, i don't mean i see ufos, greys, jabberwockys, leprechauns, the ghost of christmas past, or scenes of crimes that have yet to occur. i do not see things that are not there, at least not in the manner of which most would immediately think. what i mean to say is that i frequently live in that daydreamed world where we all live from time to time, thinking about how i might like to do this, or how the world would be better if we could only do that. i think the major difference for me - at least as i understand it to have frustrated some people surrounding me - is that while the vast majority of people out there will come back from a woolgathering session and think to themselves 'that was a lovely little dream', i will possibly never fully return to the world and see it the way that it was before i dreamed it to be something new. i dream dreams and to me they are something to act upon as though they are facts, until it becomes clear that in doing so i am tilting at yet another windmill. i don't mean to say i am deluded, merely that i can see no reason to let a dream die simply because it was a dream.

and so i will wander off in what must to someone not living in my head to be some aimless direction with no forethought or plan or even any idea of where i might end up. and while i can understand that might be the way it looks, i rest assured that i have every idea of where i may end up, and that where i actually end up is likely to be far better than what i dreamed in the first place.

the funny thing so few people really seem to grasp is that just as there is no need to let that dream die, there is no need to hold it so tightly that it is smothered to death by the dreamer. no dream has ever been brought into reality without reality exacting some toll on the form of the dream. for some this is frustrating to the point of seeming futility. i know that feeling. i lived there once myself. it is a perfectionism born of the ego, the desire to have what one wants become real with no change whatsoever, the belief that one's dream belongs to him alone and should be his own perfect creation. i lived there. i know that way. it is the way of the fool. it is the way of death for the vision.

no, reality s powerful and fickle and must be allowed to act its force, and the dream will live. it will perhaps not look the same as when it was dreamed, but if one can stand apart from the dream as if it were a child to be reared - love it, comfort it and foster it and guide it, all while allowing it to grow in the way it desires for itself - it will more often than not grow into a shining and beautiful thing larger and more wonderful than one person ever could have dreamed alone.

i think of it in terms of a work of art, the medium in which i work and in which i learned the lesson. there will come an inspiration and an image, a picture of an idea that the painter wishes to put out into the world. there are limitations, though. the canvas is rough and has flaws. the paints will have colors they cannot reproduce. the brush will fail to capture the subtlety of a smallest line of form. the light in the gallery will never be just right to convey the luminosity of the imagined subject. the artist could fight these things - prepare the canvas to a glassy-smooth surface with gesso and sanding, select a different medium to avoid the paints' limitations of color - or give into them, work with them, allow them to shape the form in their own way. in not fighting the medium, the medium does not fight back but rather cooperates, and together the artist and medium produce something final that, though different from the imagined image, is it's own wonderful creation.

these things - for me they must be felt richly and treated as though they are already what they will become. your dreams are real. the just haven't happened to you yet. but they are already happening all the time.

forgive me father, for i have sinned...

...it has been i year and some-odd days since i last have posted, and i am all the poorer for it. my life has been lived, my thoughts have been kept, and i am nonetheless confused and lost as i'd have been without changing my method of navigating this sad old world.

i am now single. as of somewhere in the neighborhood of 9:45am, tuesday march 16th my marriage is officially and technically no longer. this comes with mixed emotions, obviously. i feel like a failure, like i am less of of a man, less of a human, less of an acceptable member of society than i was on monday. foolish, yes, but the truth. i have lost the mother of my children and the stability that brings with it for them. i have lost the person who was my best friend for 13 of the almost 14 years we were married, and i am unquestionably poorer for that. on the other hand, i am finding that when i am able to look past the immediate hurt, the misery and the failure and the wallowing in self-pity and guilt, i see before me a world i never thought i deserved, or one that i never thought could exist and for which i certainly never would have asked.

this has been a long, strange trip. i have made a mess of things, no doubt. if i were to quantify the issues that led to my divorce i could not come to any conclusion but that this is my doing, my fault. no matter how i try to lay some blame in other places, my reactions and behaviors are the ultimate source of the end. and i loathe those things about myself that brought about this end.

and yet, it is those very things that i find within myself to be the very core of who i am as an individual within this world. the things that made it impossible for me to be a decent husband and partner are the things that make me who i am. this is a startling and liberating revelation in spite of the unsettling and difficult implications of such.

i am resolutely and unerringly me. i see things differently from many others. this is not always good; sometimes it just is, and oftentimes it is irreconcilable with what others in my life, or society as whole, would have make sense. this is not to say i am unapologetically individualistic. i will apologize, and happily so, if i can be brought to see that what i see makes no sense or is hurtful. and yet this is not to say i will deviate from my chosen viewpoint; though apologetic, i will not always capitulate.

i am, for the most part, an easy fellow. i have few hills on which i am willing to die. for the majority of my existence i am willing, and gladly so, to abdicate the things that are deemed important to the whims and prejudices of others. the color of the rug? happily left to you. whether to donate to habitat for humanity or heifer international? as long as there is charity, the choice is yours. but i have my hills, and they are varied and indeterminate.

i have a miserably obstinate streak in me that wants little for the requirement to seek approval. i don't need it, and i don't want it. though i may well suffer from an anxiety disorder that would have me believe that no one likes me, i also find myself not caring to modify myself to fit whatever would have the world appreciate me. i am stuck in the middle between a viewpoint that the world does not care for me and i am destined to be disliked and alone, and a relentlessly independent streak that honestly think i should have to give a crap. i am a worst possible scenario: someone who cares deeply about others' opinions of him, but who is unwilling to compromise himself to fit their molds.

i want little out of this life than this: to be able to look at myself in the mirror and know that i spent today as myself, uncompromising. to know that i can awaken tomorrow and decide that the wall of plywood decorated with wood-stain-drawn trees is a brilliant idea to finish out the dining room only because i will want to live with it. to write without concern for what someone may find threatening or offensive. to live happily in the knowledge that though i have few friends, those i have love me for who i am and not for who i am willing to be. to know that when my children spend their time with me, they will know that they are welcome to be who they are because the world into which they step does not act like the rest of the world around them: it is ours and theirs and mine, and in a way for which we will apologize and move on as we wish.

i know that this is not a personality that lends itself to a partner. perhaps that is my destiny: to be partnerless. at least for today, that idea does not hurt or concern me. i have no desire to have a partner, both because i want not for one and because i have no willingness to ask someone to be mine and bear with me. have already asked too much of someone in this world, and i have no desire to do that to someone again.

i am me. i am mine. i am relentless and difficult. i am weird. i am odd. i am brilliant and i am a moron. i care too much, and i care not at all. i am easygoing and i am impossible. i am warm and compassionate and i am heartless. i worry what you think of me and i say that you can fuck yourself if you want me to change.

i am me. i am mine. i am alone. and for now, though new, that is good.