OpenMind: A few months ago I had a dream
OpenMind is a series where I share unedited free-writing excerpts.
2.3.24 A few months ago I had a dream I was ending at one school, beginning at another I had to present something to a group of adults in a small circular room The lights were on when I began to sing and I am shocked, almost awed at the power and precision of my voice As I sing The Edge of Night the lights go out, and suddenly I am holding my faded olive meditation pants above my head—I begin to spin, to dervishly whirl around and around, holding the pants aloft, as if ready to toss them then I see a skylight and a shaft of pure moon streams onto my face I stare into the light with undaunted intensity, continuing to spin until I wake up still spinning— Sitting here now months later I can see the path, the thread, the way my dreams throw out a line of images forward for me as if to say: Here is where you are taking yourself. I just remembered the Dream as I shoved my cushion and olive pants under my bed for the first time ever. I have come to dispel all my notions of method, of religious relics, all of that meaningless systematic authority everyone else’s ideas— Last week I donated several dozen books, and as I dumped my once-beloved Freuds and Jungs von Franzs and Woodmans into the donation bin, my heart leapt up and said Yes—These are for someone else, now. It feels relieving to be free of the intellectual baggage, the addictive tendency to use everyone else’s ideas to make sense and meaning out of my experience—But isn’t that why I write or make anything? The whole purpose—well, maybe not the whole—is to make for myself. I don’t ever expect anyone to take my ideas at face value, to accept them without considering them, questioning them, and weighing them against their own experience. And I can feel it now, again, that sense of spinning, of Becoming my own internal engine, of throwing off the trappings of the past.