Overnight With Family

Everyone else is asleep and the sun has just risen over the northeastern horizon. A few clouds gently flow southward, above the main event. I myself sit on a half-couch by the second-floor windows looking east.

I slept well but was troubled by meeting someone who seemed quite nice, but later I discovered he had been an adherent of the psychotherapy/cult my father had espoused. He was nearly my age but had a young girlfriend who was eager to make my acquaintance. I was tempted but then things got fuzzy and for the rest of the dream I didn’t know if something had happened or not. If it had, I was sure I had ruined my life and would live in fear and shame forever. Every once in a while I would gratefully realize I was dreaming, but most of the time I was fully enveloped in dreaming of dreaming and waking.

Yesterday afternoon it was in the high 60’s. This morning it’s below freezing. I wonder about the two sweet pea seedlings I planted in the garden. I knew it was too early, but they were growing so fast—sending roots down through the bottom of the peat pot and climbing toward the grow-lights—and I read in an article in the Irish Times that they can tolerate a light frost so…we’ll see.

Spring is like this. While the overall trend toward warmth is assured, variation within the clear direction is to be expected. Most everything is like this. Nothing is just one thing. My father died years ago and still he shadows my dreams. Things that have happened in my life are the ground I sprouted from—those things and my stories and reactions then and now to those things have made and are continually making me who I am. And the things that haven’t happened to me, unfulfilled plans and dreams—things I have read about or seen images of—all these things are part of me too.

Life does not unfold evenly toward maturity and wisdom but seems rather to bounce around—zigzagging back and forth within as many dimensions as we can imagine. Foolishness and delusion mix endlessly with their opposites just as stories of the past mix with the hopes and fears of the future to create the present dream of now.

Yet the sun rises this morning slightly further to the north from where it did yesterday. Several months ago, in the midst of winter, from this vantage point, it rose over an entirely different neighborhood. I suppose this is relatively invariable, the seasonal trek of the rising sun from the northeast in the winter to exactly east on the spring solstice to the southeast in summer and then back again.

Meanwhile, we dream our dreams and call them our lives. We do our best to wake up and make something of ourselves. We are told the long arc of history bends toward justice but many of us wonder how to add the weight of our lives to this hopeful but uncertain proposition how to spend ourselves wisely.

Back home, my sweet pea shoots may or may not have survived the overnight cold. Being naturally cautious, I only planted two of the seven that sprouted in the warmth of the grow-lights. So I continue to dream of fragrant and delicate blossoms climbing the wooden wall and keep my options open.