Sunday, December 21, 2014

THE SEASON

Sunday December 21, 2014 8:24 pm

In a book titled Zahir, meaning, 'the obvious' the author Coelho wrote the following narrative:

(Ester had asked why people are sad?)

"That’s simple," says the old man. "They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why... they forget their dreams.”

I wonder... can it honestly be no more than that? (They forget their dreams?) If so, if that really is all that it is then it's altogether sublime... and yet at the very same time it is ineffably sad!

Today was my day off and I purposed to go nowhere and I made no plans other than one brief outing and then back home. I have taken no phone calls and neither have I exchanged emails... again, I purposed to use this day to get a few things done. However, plans (not unlike dreams) have a way of changing and even though well-intended my list of things to do was interrupted (inexplicably) by falling into a deep slumber on the couch! (Have you ever fallen asleep without even realizing you were going to drop off?)

I think because of that nap and my confused thoughts upon awaking is why I'm writing this blog just now. My intentions were to come to my office and pay some bills while Deb finished up the wrapping and separating of the gifts we are delivering Christmas Eve. (She is now doing her part as she is sitting in the floor on the other side of my desk and filling gift bags.)

Coelho had written an allegory I read a few years ago that seemed apt to me and when I had gone searching for it to read it again (after I decided to take a break from check- writing and do this blog) I came across the above story, and it all seemed to fit... neatly I think? In the allegory I was looking for he had compared a set of RR tracks to a marriage... 'two tracks stay together forever but they never draw any closer.' (Perhaps another's dreams do sort of become our own and we end of living their lives rather than our own?)

Perhaps I, like millions of other people have for so long lived what others want that it is impossible any longer to separate what was once my own: my thoughts... my wants... my hopes... my loves... my dreams??? Maybe that is why I'm constantly drawn in my thoughts to the last line in a poem from one of my favorite authors, Edgar Allan Poe. (“...Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?)

Myriad times I have lived two lives... one while fully awake and one while in deep slumber. Betimes it would be nigh to impossible for me to state with certainty which was the more 'true reality' for me! (It is also true there have been times when I have sought sleep to escape certain realities... and there have been times when I have found my soul sorrowful to have awoken from some sweet dreams. Those are the times I most often understand the 'dream within a dream' idea that Poe so elegantly wrote about.)

Well, unfortunately the bills won't pay their own selves so I suppose I will stop this now. However, I will include the following poem that is a hard lesson learned that I so wish I had known decades ago! Whether in a conscious state or in slumber Yeats words would do well for any soul to believe and practice.

Maybe we really are destined to fulfil and act out a role given us by circumstance, happenstance, or perhaps even some plan designed by another... and One whom we can't even begin to fathom! Hopefully though our lives are not a cosmic joke and we are poor actors on a stage and not much more than court jesters acting like buffoons!

So, whether I ever really had a choice (as I sit here and think and type) I know not... but, long ago had I been prescient and could have foretold the future I would have followed Yeats sage advice in the following poem!

Never Give All The heart

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost. ~ Yeats

I can not imagine I will write again, at least until after the new year sometime... so, I will take this time to wish everyone who reads this a very happy holiday season to all!

(Of course, had I not fallen into a deep sleep and had unbidden dreams I would not have been writing this tonight either. So, keeping with the thought that plans change, who really knows when I will write again? Certainly not me!)

posted by Robin Johnson @ 8:24 PM