brain dump

some random thoughts:

I had a dream that I was sitting at my computer (in a house and room that looked nothing like my real ones) and suddenly about 20 old post-its appeared, stuck to the screen. They were actual post-its of messages I have written in real life, all different colors and sizes, stacked up willy nilly on top of each other and obscuring the screen.

I knew they had not been there a second ago -- they came out of nowhere, and I was totally mystified. Then I said, (apparently I talk to myself out loud in dreams, too), "Well, the only explanation for this is that I am dreaming. But that's ridiculous! Obviously, this is reality!"

When I woke up this morning and remembered this dream, and how absolutely certain I had felt that it could not be a dream because it was REAL, I laughed out loud. I feel exactly as certain that I am truly awake now, and this is REAL!

but is it?

Back to the dream. I suddenly realized there were three unused rooms in my house. They were down a long and isolated hallway near the front entrance, and the doors had always been kept closed. I had known about them at one time, but my focus and activity were centered in another wing of the house, and I never went down that hall.

So I went to take a look at them. They each badly needed a paint job and a lot of junk removed, but one was a perfect place to hold in-person client sessions, another was ideal for a workout room, and a third would make a beautiful and comfortable guest room. Not coincidentally, I've recently been toying with new possibilities for myself in exactly those domains! Cool, huh? I guess there's some space already designated for expansion.

I wandered back into the main area of my house in the dream, excited to share my find, and found my former husband there, setting up a bunch of workout machines in my office. He was wearing a brace that kept his shoulders back so they wouldn't round over, and he was in a lot of pain. I offered to rub his back for him, and he accepted. This might seem like no big deal, except that in real life, he would never allow me to touch him, and rarely even makes eye contact. It was such a warm and natural exchange of friendship, and it was really sweet to feel that with him again, even if only in the dreamtime.

Now, on to "reality."

My daughter is taking a pottery class this semester, and she loves it. She was telling me all about their first day sculpting, and how she held the clay in her hands and played with it a while, and then became aware as she looked at it that she could SEE the finished piece inside it.

So she began to consciously manipulate it in the direction of her vision. She loved the feeling of her hands in the clay, making her goal manifest. I, of course, heard a metaphor for life in there. Let's see if I can flesh it out:

We are living lumps of clay. After we are born, we each spend varying amounts of time and energy just playing with physical reality and our bodies -- getting to know how we feel from the inside, learning under which conditions we are most flexible, testing how far we can stretch ourselves before we break, exploring which shapes we can hold without compromising our structural integrity, and frequently smushing it all back together so we can conduct more experiments.

And then, a magnificent vision occurs to us, and we begin to sculpt intentionally in order to bring it forth. But not with our hands. We mold our lives with our attention and our thoughts. When we finish, we step back and evaluate. Is this satisfying? Is this what I wanted to create?

If so, we play with it like that a while. And naturally, as we play, we may notice some improvements we could make here and there. Some of us keep our first sculpture and just fine tune it, others prefer to smush it all up and start fresh each time.

In my case, it took a really long time to realize that my attention and thoughts are my tools. I still forget that alot, and try really hard to force something into existence with my will, or lots of hard work, or tears of frustration, or reasoning with it.

But the clay of my life doesn't respond to these efforts. It just sits there, happily being lumpy, patiently waiting for me to play with it and warm it up again. Getting my hands in the clay always helps me relax, and when I settle down I remember that all I need to do is focus my thoughts and attention toward what I want to see, and it will naturally and organically manifest itself. My daughter didn't force her sculpture into the clay - she and the clay worked and played together to reveal it.