Sunday, January 18, 2009

Sleeping and waking


Fine, thanks. That is, for months now, calm and creatively engaged. There are periods of unrelenting cheeriness. And were it not for the dreaming thing, I’d have to say that life was heading in a distinctly upward direction.

Waking, I shake off dreams of being enrolled in a university class and trying to explain that I’ve lost my purse to the professor, who simply keeps assuring me with enormous heartiness that I’ll do fine, just fine in the class – look, I’ve already made friends, apparently. It’s as if I’m speak in Farsi.

I search for my purse in a cloakroom festooned with coats and red purses. My purse is black. And I know that somehow, at lunch, I ended up on a slippery, snow-covered red plastic bridge only 3 feet wide. I look down at the far-below traffic and realize that I have no idea how I got there, and that I’m in danger. I shinny down on my stomach, gripping the edge. And now? I leave the classroom and set out to find the purse…my ID, my money…but I’m standing on a hilltop in what seems to be San Francisco. It’s cold and snowing and I don’t know the city. I can’t remember how to retrace my steps and I’m desperate.

Or I’m about to sing at a concert with a Very Famous Person. I have complete confidence in my ability to sing, only I can’t remember a single song or lyric.

I am lost or don’t know how I got there or missing some crucial piece of the puzzle…struggling to keep the ground under my feet, some control over my life, some sense (for God’s sake) of knowing what is next.

But I don’t. Know.

I think most of us embrace the illusion that there is an AHA moment coming in our lives…an age, a stage, when we begin to understand. When life becomes easier, or at least or resistance to the tide diminishes and we can flow. Certainly, speaking for myself, I hadn’t expected to be approaching 61 with the feeling that my biggest question is “what the….?”

So I’ve booked an appointment with an excellent astrologer. Recently, he suffered a devastating stroke and lost just about everything but (and I quote) his mind and consciousness. I told him what my big question is. And he still took the appointment.

I’ll let you know…