A Handful of Dreams

Last couple of weeks have been agonizing, brutal and exhausting - personally and collectively - and to make it through I slept a lot. Naps and early bedtimes and ten or more hours down and out each day. Mostly dreamless sleep, the sleep of the dead, the sleep that you need when you need to shut out the world and all its indifference and cruelty. The sleep that comes when the fuses are blown and the switch is flipped to off and you want to get off the ride.

Until last night:

I dream that a dull but very polite white middle-class couple has come over. I am completely incapable of small talk. I am antsy to get out of the house, outside and head to whatever public event we are required to negotiate together. I want distance and fresh air - and this all feels too close, too smothering, too indoors and too tedious. I realize too late that I haven’t offered them anything, not even water or a cup of tea. The pandemic has rendered me incapable of this kind of superficial social interaction.

I wake up relieved and grateful that the pandemic and the strict protocols I have had to establish to protect my health have also completely protected me from the inoffensive but none-the-less truly draining unbearable chit-chat with strangers that used to steal my energies in the “before-time.” The “forced” communities that I am mandated to participate in by proximity and locality I am now more necessarily suspicious of then ever. Unmasked, dissociated, entitled or oblivious those who imagine themselves to be the nicest, friendliest people seem give little thought to protecting high-risk folks like me.

But fortunately I am able to spend the bulk of my days engaged in online and intentionally curated communities, a community of choice. I talk for many hours of every day with groups and individuals about real things, about death, illness, disability, about dreams and the divine and mysticism, about service, vocation, about meaning and moral injury, about grief, joy, love and life.

Proximal communities are now a threat, an explicit hazard to be avoided. Only individuals who are vetted, who are capable of direct communication, who can contract for safety and accept my environmental requirements, who are stalwart and care to protect me are allowed in my presence - and lets face it, if we are going through all of that it better be for some big talk, not small talk.

I dream of a sentence:

Words scroll through my head, on repeat, like a mantra: “I will never again speak of anything that does not include its opposite.”

Big talk requires that we include all the facets that expelled elsewhere. All the things that are excluded from polite and unvetted company. Big talk requires creating space to examine all the questions that emerge from below and allow them air and light.

Living with a high risk condition has been excruciating in so many ways. There have been staggering, unfathomable losses, shocking betrayals, unimaginable abandonments. The political and national horrors, the murders of children, and churchgoers and elders, and the violent legislative oppressions bludgeon us into states that are alternately raw, enraged or numb.

It is easy to become fixated on the horror, the alienation, the rage and sorrow, and to spend a week with the covers pulled over my head. But sometimes dreams come and lead me back to gratitude: I have rid myself of small-talk. I have freed myself from models of connection, relationship and support that were onerous, expensive, oppressive, tedious, and exhausting. I have been forced into casting wider nets, to loving people over greater distances, to seeking out deeper alignments, shared values, mutual respect. I have been able to build and curate communities of like-minded, brave-hearted people who choose to gather around the kinds of questions that I cherish.

I dream of living question marks, not reptile, not mammal. Perhaps feathered or more properly fuzzy, like wooly bear caterpillars. Fuzzy question marks that suddenly rise up out of the earth in a tree well on a crowded city street. I know they are not safe here, they will be trampled intentionally by those who do not like them, or by those who do not bother to watch where they are stepping. I collect them in a bucket, they remained curled in hooks of alert curiosity. I will take them to a space that I know of, a kind of preserve, simultaneously wilder and more protected where they can move through their transformations, live out their lives and raise their offspring.

I know the questions that emerge from the ground of my being, that take on a life of their own, were too often trampled down in proximal communities that I have lived in. They are seen as threatening, or weird, or buggy, or simply beneath interest.

Somehow, through this terrible era, every single conversation I engage in, every relationship and community I encounter, includes its opposites, requires collaborative contemplation, allows sacred questions to live freely, and relishes big talk. And I know that there is a specific kind of small conversation I will never feel bound by again.

And it is important and relieving to be reminded that opportunities for gratitude remain even when heartbreak has claimed the foreground.