It is both odd and encouraging when you have a very fine dream, don’t you think? Last night I had the first epic dream I’ve had in a while. In it, I’m being drawn, as if by clues. Nothing is spelled out. I am being carried along by the experience of it, going along without meaning to go, but realizing after I am on my way that I was ready to go all along. This morning, writing of it, I know I have the same general feeling about life right now. I am being carried along. I don’t know that I’m ready for what is happening until it is happening and I’ve been started on my way. Then, Yes. I am ready. I have been ready a long while. Musing on this I kept hearing the voice of Jodie Foster in the movie “Contact,” the scene where she thinks she’s about to test a vehicle that will take her into space—something she’s always wanted to do, and as the thing shakes and she vibrates with its energy, she won’t stop saying,“I’m good to go.”
Somehow, what we love makes us “good to go” . . . even if we don’t know it or decide it or have much to do with the propellant.
A Course of Love is a big love of mine. Its republication is a good part of the reason for the feeling of similarity between life and the dream. Clues are dropped, actions are happening, I’m being drawn along by a thing in motion. I have ceased to be the vehicle. I am no longer doing the physical things I used to carry out. I am being carried. It almost brings tears to my eyes, tears and a Hey wait a minute, I don’t know how to do this feeling. Because this isn’t a “creative” getting carried, which I’m as used to as a person can ever be amid the joy and surprise of it, but a carried along that is about external as well as internal life.
Writing and the inner life have been both my work and my passion for a long while. Family is a third great love and since I have my seven-year-old grandson Henry living with me right now, my cabin time isn’t as great as it once was, and as soon as I get a chance, the cabin is where I come and writing is what I do. Writing and reading. My love affair with writing is most evident in my journal writing. I write because when I write I see what I didn’t see before, and when I read journals I meet other people for whom this is true.
Lately I have been accompanying Joyce Carol Oates out of the seventies decade. I leave her tome of a book in the cabin, and the days of it go by slowly along with mine. Today I am with her as 1980 begins and she’s musing that the spiritual side of her nature is largely in eclipse.
In 1997 a journal of mine was published as part of The Grace Trilogy. Take Heart is reissuing the books of the Trilogy as ebooks (Love, Grace, and Peace) in a month or so. As I reviewed Peace, I kept thinking how I “didn’t see.” That’s what journals show too. Even the great Thomas Merton didn’t see until he saw. And as I read JCO telling of her spiritual nature being in eclipse, I know it is not so. She says: “I sometimes feel like a shadowy self has taken me over. A superficial though charming—I suppose charming!—“social” personality. But the deeper person, the spirit, the psyche, remains stubbornly hidden.”
The rich ground of being is always such . . . until it is not.
