Dreaming

This morning I pick up Mark Nepo’s The Endless Practice and I read this:

Wakefulness is not a destination

but a song the human heart keeps singing

Thank god. There it is, a tiny shaft, the crack as Leonard Cohen wrote, that lets the light in. A reminder who I am. Who we are. There’s no end game here, just a human heart that keeps on trying.

I’m both relieved for the reminder, right there in print, and grief stricken that it is so easily forgotten; and in the oblivion so much lost.

The other day I came upon a blog by a woman older than me who quite unexpectedly became an entrepreneur later in life. She writes that each morning she jumps out of bed excited what each new day will bring, what might be created that day.

My envy was palpable. It’s been years since I’ve known that feeling. Definitely not since my marriage ended ten years ago and I was plunged into acute depression and a true dark night of the soul that went on for years. The worst has passed, but most of the time I’m like a cloudy day. I know the sun is there somewhere, I just can’t find it. Or worse, when days string into weeks and weeks into months, forget that it exists altogether.

Then along comes Nepo, who has pulled me out of the dark and cold time and time again, writing in his simple staggering way about the heart, about our precious human journeys. And a silly little five-day online thingy about writing your dreams into being. Spiritually schooled for years in Advaita, where the ever present now is the only place to be, it seems like heresy. This dreaming is bullshit, I mutter to myself and at the same moment I pull out my colorful markers and giant pad of paper and begin to fantasize about what I would like my life to look like in two or three years. 

But it’s no mystery. I can tell you right now, I want it to look like that woman’s: Creative and exciting. Filled with passions and beauty. But also, I want an open heart; I want more sunny days than cloudy. And while we’re at it, let’s heal that trauma and the shame and exhaustion that pour from its center. How about an entire revisioning about the whole ageing thing? Oh god, and learn how to finally make those gorgeous, dreamy photos that I swoon over; write enough essays to fill a book; learn how to use Tumblr; be in nature everyday; have a relationship again.

And for a moment the clouds are parted and there it is: a tender human heart singing its wild dreams.