Or is it more plummets and slow returns to moments of life? Not sure how to describe this grief thing – last few days I felt completely blah and then my appetite began to return and I was reminded, through so mucyh love from friends, to be present to each moment and then the blankness blahness is no longer a dark monolith but constantly shifting and alive, so alive.
I had a lovely dream about Dad night before last – he kept almost dying and then coming back to life and at one point, although weak, he was up and about, being himself, at a sort of party with a bunch of guys. Then last night I dreamed for hours about being a painter and woke up thinking, "That’s it. Painting is my deepest desire." But then, walking in the warm damp colored-splattered landscape, it came to be that my deepest desire is, as it has been since I can remember, to wake people up to consciousness, to life, to saving the world. That perhaps I keep shrinking from this desire because I think I’m not doing it right, and that my desire to write fiction that changes the world and paint is more my ego wanting acclaim than my soul’s desire. Thoughts?
Then I consider the work I’m embarking on with the very cool and smart SpringAir company, and I know that it has to be in the marketplace that we change the world – it has to be through the decisions we make there. Polemics have never worked but perhaps comfort (as a start) can.
Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable!
2 responses so far ↓
1 Michele Nov 6, 2006
Thank you for sharing your ups and downs. I am so glad to hear your dad is visiting you during dreamtime. Shamans know this reality and that other world ‘dreamtime’ is really just a veil apart.
You are like a shaman because you shapeshift reality for dreamtime to happen in this reality for your readers and clients. Visits such as this are so profound. There is a book you may want to peruse- “losing a parent-passage to a new way of living” by Alexandra Kennedy. She writes about her dad’s death in such a profound way.
If this were my dream I’d play with the name ‘Spring Air’…it sounds like a wonderful omen to me that can help support your grief, the swoops and dips and painting your deepest desires. I wonder what the Spring Air will hold six months from now??? **smile**
In loving support,
Michele
2 Tracy Nov 6, 2006
I don’t think we all have just one deepest desire… perhaps there could be more than one desire, and their degrees of depth interchange with one another at different points in our lives (or different days, depending on the day). Having said that, I teeter totter between loving and rejecting that notion as I struggle to pinpoint my deepest desires… I wake every morning wondering if today will be the day I will figure it out. I look for clues everywhere, and then resign myself to the fact that maybe I’m searching too hard… that maybe its just something that’s right under my nose… but I’m not sure I’ve found ‘IT’ yet. Even when I do figure out my deepest desire, I do wonder if there will be this sense of calm because I’ve found my purpose (are purpose and desire the same thing?). Something tells me that I’ll still wonder, as you do, if I’m doing the right thing for me.
As for you Jen… only you know what your deepest desires are. However, what I know is this. What you do is indeed very important ~ there is no doing it right or wrong ~ and the great thing about that is we’re all learning right along with you. You have woken me up to consciousness more times than I can possibly count, and you have done it by just being you… by asking the questions, by voicing your observations on life, authenticity, emotion, feelings, and thoughts. For that, you have my deepest and heartfelt gratitude.
If you want to write fiction and paint, then do those things too! Feeling a deep desire to do those things is feeling a desire to be creative, to express yourself in a different way. I recently watched an interview with Tony Bennett, and something he said still resonates with me. He is not only a singer, but an accomplished painter. When asked where his true passion lies ~ with singing or painting ~ he said that one compliments the other. Because he paints he is a better singer, and because he sings, he is a better painter. He wouldn’t want to do one without the other.
Jen, perhaps this is also true for you.
Warmly,
Tracy