Last night I dreamed in French. It was the strangest thing, to be thinking and speaking in a language I'm really not fluent in and haven't practiced in 20 years or more. The dream was complex and absorbing... all about some competitive reality-show type situation I was involved in in Paris. I was younger, ambitious... speaking French.
I woke feeling heavy and stuffed with wool, my head still partially wreathed in Français, feeling vaguely disappointed, vaguely robbed. Of what, I don't know.
Today I can't seem to concentrate. I move papers around my desk, open email, close it. Move things around again. I realize the restlessness inside me is coming from something that wants to get out. Maybe it's all that language I rolled around with in my sleep. But something in me seeks an outlet.
Today is Mabon: the pagan festival of Thanksgiving and the beginning of fall. Fall has always been my favorite season, despite – or maybe partially because of – its faint sense of sadness, of nostalgia. I love to see the trees begin to change color, and to notice the shortening of the days, week by week... descending toward winter's dark heart. I love the excuse to stay indoors and read books by the window, and finally being able to cook big pots of hot, steamy comfort food that I can freeze and feast off of all winter long. So welcome on those cold, wretched days when you can't think of anything to cook, or your cupboards are bare or you're just too tired or too disheartened to think of preparing anything.
But it also makes me restless... wanting to be doing something... creating something... maybe changing something.
Twice at this time of year we have found Monarch caterpillars curling up to begin the transformation into butterflies. That's how I feel. Like curling up and liquifying inside a beautiful gold-flecked chrysalis – to emerge remade, a creature as different from my past self as the orange and black Monarch is different from its pajama-striped and earth-bound larval form.
I wonder if it hurts the caterpillar? Or if it just enters into a kind of hibernation until it wakes up in its new body. It's a bit painful to me. But mine is because I'm not, of course, transforming. I'm going to wake up tomorrow and the day after that as the same old caterpillar. Eating and making my way back and forth along my twig. I suppose it could be worse.
So I toodle back and forth on my metaphorical twig... twitch my shiny black antennae and think. lately I think these things:
I look at all the lovely houses in Norman – large and small – and I want to live in them. I long for Home. I jealously compare their paint colors, garden designs, architectural styles. I peer in open windows as I pass them at night to get an idea of what kinds of lives are going on inside them. I lust after them and have to tear my eyes away from them when I'm driving to keep my focus on the road. Like mine were the eyes of a dirty old man next to a nubile young starlet in a low-cut dress. I want a home for reasons I can't even express or understand. Everything feels temporary without it. Nothing is mine. Radio stories tell me that now is not necessarily the time to buy... that Americans all around the country are reconsidering the value of home ownership. But I itch to own my own home again. And I feel frozen in amber until I do. Incapable of moving forward, futureless, inert.
I think about books: all the beautiful, wonderful, piled up books in my shelves and on my tables. I would spend part of every day in the book store or library if I could. I want to open them all and read them simultaneously, sucking up the stories and the information, feeling the words roll around in my mouth and mind.
By the time I was in 3rd or 4th grade, I no longer articulated language in my mind as I read. The words went more or less straight to my brain, without being "spoken" in my imagination. But somewhere in college that ability went away. I now feel each word wanting to escape through my lips. Gray used to tease me for whispering as I read... mouthing the words. But I love the way they feel, and I want to enjoy them, like smooth pearls along a string. I want to both take them into me and ride along with them. Sometimes I can't settle on one book, but have several open at any one time, moving from one to another as the mood takes me. And I think about them... which ones I'll read next, which ones I
should read...
I think about Life a lot. And I think about Love: what the odds are of its permanence... how you know. (You don't.) I think about what I should expect, what I believe in, and how to know what is real. Sometimes I feel sure I've got a grip on it... and sometimes I'm sure that I do not. This irks me and I worry it like a rough tooth in my mind. Is love a feeling or a choice? Can you create and maintain it out of whole cloth, simply by determining that you
will?
Sometimes I think about Quantum physics. I don't really understand it, but it fascinates me. It's magic... explained! That takes me back to books: what I should read to get a better grasp on it... whether or not I should move on to that or go back to Jung's
Man and His Symbols, that I was reading before I picked up
Aftermath about 2012, that I was reading alternately with a book about the Gaia theory for awhile. There are unfinished books on Buddhism, creativity, writing, spirituality. Books of essays and short stories and self-help books and books of poetry (which I buy even though I'm really bad at reading poetry). From there I feel guilty about all the unread books and want to stack them all up on the coffee table and start plowing through them, one by one.
All in all, it would be more restful to just think about
work.
Not so.
