Clown Class: Big Dreamer

I went and sat on my front porch early this morning to feel the breeze and enjoy fresh plant smells. 

The birds were out in force, chirping, whistling, “creating content”. 

One bird was making a distinctive sound that stood out from the high-pitched eees and cheeps that were trending in the local greenery. That one had a throatier gup-gup-gup sound that I found myself looking forward to. That bird didn’t weigh in as often. That bird understood and deployed the value of scarcity. Or it was spacing out or doing some thinking. Maybe it went back to its book.  

How detailed is their discourse, the birds of the neighborhood? Do they only get to say one thing over and over? I’d like the bird chatter to be detailed and sophisticated. Maybe bird language really is homonyms, homonyms, homonyms and they’re breaking all kinds of situations down for each other on every level and you have to be a bird to get the context clues. I love to anthropomorphize. I want the birds to be a Wes Anderson movie. I could just let them be themselves but…eh.

I’m jealous of birds in the sense that they open their throats and make their own true sounds—exactly, they’re exactly themselves, they nail it every time—and the chance that they get neurotic about their speech is slim.

Probably not the gup-gup bird: 

what did they think about what I said earlier

was today even the day to say that 

I’m thinking about dreams. 

I’m not thinking about night dreams or small daydreams but the dreams we have for our lives. 

They’re good, right? Good to have? Big dreams? Or is it bad, are they bad, are they dangerous. 

Can you break your own heart unnecessarily with a big dream? Yes. You can a) set yourself up to fail in the first place by attaching yourself to a dream that doesn’t have anything much to do with your true sound and b) you can pursue even a perfectly fitting dream without making yourself ready to handle the fact that you might fall short or fail anyway. Worse, you can develop and nurse the terrible idea that a failed dream is your actual identity. 

The lightness of being a bird making a plain sound. 

Lightness. Up, going up. Are all dreams dreams of going up? 

I have a specific big life dream I’ve been in relationship with for a few years, which is the writing and not-writing of a novel. 

I’ve had a book dream for much longer than this novel dream but the book dream used to be a dream of writing and publishing a memoir, and the dream of this memoir was the dream of getting my family wrestled into a box, with me standing on top of the box accepting a medal and lots of hugs for living through certain things and understanding everything that happened so perfectly.

I wrote a lot of words over many years to this deluded aim, none of which wanted to be part of a book.

That memoir dream has withered and died and I feel fine because I have this novel dream, a little bit newer, which still has a faint pulse even though I’ve been dangling it out a high window lately and threatening to drop it on the pavement once and for all. 

I want to live well and wisely, is all, whichever way that is. I never know which way is the way to live well. I’ll think I know for months at a time and then I’ll seem wrong and change my mind. I don’t want to break my own heart.

I’m dragging the novel dream out here in front of you all to pull it apart. (Not the novel itself! Not the plot! Who even knows what that is at this point? Not me. I’m talking about the dream as a Dream.) I’m tired of babying this dream and hiding it. Maybe there’s something we can all eat in the pieces.

The novel dream is still about my family but the action of the dream has changed. I will definitely never understand anything that happened in our life together, the people in my family cannot possibly fit in a box, and I don’t want to stand on top of them any more. But everyone in my family was (or is) so flavorful. Large flavors, intense properties. I want to put them all in a cauldron. I want to gather my family in one place, cook them down with attention so they’re digestible somehow, make them into a memorable and delicious meal that transmits their properties so they can keep doing what they were meant to do. I would like to feel like I digested being in their company, among their myths.

The dream isn’t about hugs or medals any more. Okay, listen. I’d always take a medal but not for surviving anything. I’d take a medal for wrestling these people into a book successfully. They’re lively, resistant bastards and so am I.

Something I do when I feel like I will never make a big dream come true and that’s getting me down = I pretend to be a ghost.

It’s so good for a few minutes. A fantastic thing to pretend, being a ghost. What a relief. I pretend that this life is over but I still get to hang out and talk to people and watch shows and eat food. Hang it up, ego! You’re over! We have a ghostly heart and brain for having fun with, and some taste buds and a nose, and that’s it!

It is sad, a little. The lightness of being a ghost is cool but the resigned-unto-dying part is not, as they say, a vibe. Is this ghost game wise in a Zen parable way or is it a mistake? Yes.

Most mornings I sit at my altar (I have an antique French desk that’s been with me my whole life, since babyhood, which gives it a wonderful old friend feeling that couldn’t be better for a personal altar), light some tea lights and incense, make some offerings and pull a Tarot card.

I’ve been doing the ghost game a lot lately. I haven’t been able to feel my novel in months, not since a few weeks after my mom died.

The card I pulled today is from a Finnish deck called the Mythologia Fennica. I pull cards from this particular deck with the intention of getting messages from My People, by which I mean my deceased family and ancestors and whoever else is out there who loves me and is invested in how I’m doing.

If you’re familiar with the Tarot, this is the equivalent of the Fool card. The Fool is the newest of the new, the beginner of the story. The Fool just got here and doesn’t have any context for anything at all.

When I saw this card, I got the message right away:

Stop being a ghost. Go the other way. You can still avoid getting tangled in or wrecked by your Big Dreams without killing them. Be new! It’s just as refreshing as being a ghost but you’re not dead and you haven’t failed or broken your heart. You just got here. You can’t have. You don’t have to drag a string around all the time with Dream Status flags tied along its length:

“going great”

“underway”

“fading”

“failing”

“dead”

“revived”

What is a dream, anyway? Is a dream a way of becoming someone else, someone better? Is it to stay you but make your sound?

I’ve had something like this BE NEW, NOT A GHOST insight many times before. It always feels fresh because I always forget.