Word of the Week - 10

Word of the Week:  SLEEP

Just as I was wishing for a spring tonic, thinking of old commercials for Geritol, I went to bed weary and befuddled, slept, and woke up renewed.  It didn't last all day, not at the same strength as the zestful awakening, yet it was still miraculous.

Was there ever a more benevolent companion?  It is the iron that smooths the wrinkles out of the most hopeless-seeming, too-new chambray shirt, the one that introduces, however briefly, the notion that cotton might be the enemy.  Other parts of the day, regardless of the pleasure or sense of achievement they bring, are but phantom goodness compared to bedtime.  There I sink into happy oblivion, knowing on the other side I will rise, a better version of myself, patient, clear-headed, no longer running on empty.

I am not a lovely sleeper.  I know I drool, I know I snore, as a child I talked in my sleep and may still do so.  My favorite clothes are as soft as ancient flannel pajamas.  Until very recently - a habit to which I may return - I took a nap most afternoons.  For the past week I haven't needed to get up quite as early and receive a nearly adequate amount of sleep without napping, though I believe there can never be too much.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

Ernest Hemingway

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/sleep.html#3dJ0dUXxcX9uQqEo.99

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?” Ernest Hemingway.

The states induced by sleep help me hold onto a belief in parallel universes, astral travel.  Unlike Hemingway, who may have been exaggerating, sleep is not the only part of my life with enough stick-um to keep things together, yet it seems to be the land in which the unlikely appears less so.  Dreams, in full color and microscopic detail, feel like attending a festival of movies, in each of which I have a part.  Because they frequently involve reunions with the departed, I may wake up with impossible longing for a little more time together.

Though dreams may leave me with a physical residue of emotions, I am mostly clueless as to their meaning, my best guess being only that.  I push on hoping, trusting, that some of the wisdom they've deposited seeps through the veils into ordinary consciousness possibly manifesting as intuition, that unexplainable knowing which I am always willing to follow, even while questioning the advice.

Sleep heals and consoles, becomes Spackle for the fissures through which our waking dreams may seep and evaporate.  Sleep finds the wallet we lost on the bus and returns it with contents intact, it shrinks time and distance and offers the keys to a city in which we are no older than our 40s, ever nimble, agile of mind, undimmed and have not yet given up on romance.  No wonder I believe in magic.

The Mysterious Stranger

In my mind's eye, this is a version of me, Marylinn's Giant Book of Manifestation under my arm, sly glances about the street, off to make all my wishes real.

Illustrator:  N. C. Wyeth,
July 1916, from Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger. "On the fourth day comes the astrologer from his crumbling old tower."

With an infinite capacity for self-delusion or, in less abrasive terms, self-confusion, we (by which I mean I) believe it is not only my assignment to figure it all out, but that it is within the realm of the possible, ignoring all natural laws to the contrary. Townes Van Zandt knows this territory well.

The longer I keep my passport current for this galactic voyage, the greater my awareness that I have one choice if I am  to be anything other than in opposition with my own life.  That choice is surrender.   That this is true for me does not assure me it is true for you as well, but signs point to yes.  Surrender is letting go, so different than giving up.  Surrender is acknowledging that there is an answer but that it hasn't shown up yet.  No amount of effort or intellect, will or desire can change that.  Last night I dreamed I was explaining to a child, impatient for some happy outcome, that things take a long time.  A very long time.  I felt myself as both characters, asking and receiving the unwelcome response, breaking the not-really-bad news, making smoothing motions with my hands to show how it does, eventually and miraculously, come level.

My art for today will be something yet unknown.  It will not be the magical lettering for the cover of my Giant Book of Manifestation.  It may be performance art: a rubber band around my wrist to remind me to snap out of it.  We are not intended to sink into our dreams but to soar along side, carry them under our flared and fraying sleeves, not the book of wishes asking them to come, please.  Soon.

I soar, I roar

Photos, face painting by Alia Leadabrand, my niece.

Not a disguise but a true face.  The wonder of passing through the world as one's unmistakable self.  Ordinary life's greedy fingers want to winkle all traces of faerie dust from our pockets.  Without our magic we are tired whoopee cushions, faded, flat and unfunny.   Yet there is hope, for other more benevolent forces are spray painting evidence of dazzle back onto the ceilings and walls, flamboyant enough so that we will not so easily be sedated into dull amnesia.  We will not through intention or accident forget who we are.

Thank you, Alia and these beautiful children, for being today's messengers.  I stopped this morning and picked my fortune from among the envelopes in the face painter's basket.  It said, "Sleep with your dreams under your pillow.  Be grateful in advance for all wishes bestowed.  Stardust is the greatest force in the universe."

Visitors

(I begin with the acknowledgement that other people's dreams are probably pretty boring. If we just pretended they were fiction, fleshed them out, they might be passable. What follows are as many bits as could be gathered from a dream, held as a blog draft, never quite gotten back to. I assume there is a reason that I searched my drafts today and found this. Possibly because I had another visitation dream this week, a different friend of whose death more than 10 years ago I just learned. Are others visited in dreams by the departed, knowing in the dream that they are no longer with us here, yet awakening with the sense of having been given just a little more time in their company?)

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There is no door at the street level to keep anyone from drifting up the stairs. Our rooms are singles; we live where we work, bringing whatever aid, comfort and strength we can summon to children who wash their own tattered socks and underwear, then hang them to dry on the rusted handlebars of wheel-less bicycles at the end of the corridor.

I have another home somewhere but this seems to be where I can be found. I answer a knock on the door to my room and one of the children tells me there is someone looking for me, says he didn't want to startle me by just showing up. It is Jack and even in the dream I know that he died more than 9 years ago. And here he is in workingman clothes with smooth skin and kindness.

He has been looking for me, I know without being told. We half hug and even kiss about 80 per cent, edges of lips touching; it was never like that. Both my dream and dreaming selves feel a deep wonder, heart-stabbing, breath-stopping joy. Is he thinner, is it someone else who just reminds me, in some ways yet not others, of the man, smart and lost, whose Impala was named Magnolia, his dogs Morgan and Bodie?

Reasonable facsimile Impala, thanks to oldparkedcars.com.

His car is downstairs, he tells me, and says let's go eat. Since leaving reporting to work as a city planner, he has been the first to know about new businesses - restaurants - and become friends with the owners. He parks on the dream version of Colorado Boulevard outside a sandwich shop with a frontage no wider than two bodies. They know him, greet him, show us to a table - the inside not much more spacious than the entry suggested - and he orders for us...pork sandwiches, Cuban, Mexican, I'm not sure, but spicy, on fresh-baked, thick bread. In moments of the dream he is more Jack; as I work to remember it, he becomes more slight, quavering almost, yet his essence true.

As we drive from the restaurant, I ask him what writers I have to read before my days run out; who is essential. I say I've never read Joyce, never read Faulkner. He answers but in a voice so soft that I have to lean closer and ask him to say it again. He talks about who were his favorites; says something about Joyce that makes me laugh. Then we are walking on streets near City Hall where he once worked. He tells me he has found free parking, since the meters are now so expensive. What he had done is bury his car in the plantings along the north side of the abandoned YWCA building. I never learn what I must read.