Friday, October 17, 2008

Dreams

I'm having lots of dreams these days. These nights. Mostly in the early morning, I think. The other night in the midst of a long dream, I performed a healing. In the dream. I walked by a young man on a hospital bed. He was gravely hurt. I started to go on by, but I thought I could help him, so I decided to try. I went over to him and put my hand on his left side where his injury was, and then I put my other hand over his mouth.

A few moments later, he opened his eyes. He was well. He was going to live. He rolled over and looked at me. He said, "I have not been good during my life." I shrugged and said, "It doesn't matter. You don't have to be good. It's up to you now what you want to make of your life."

This reminds me now of Mary Oliver's Wild Geese, doesn't it?

She writes, "You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

Ah yes, Mary. I need to remember your words. Always. Perhaps that was what I was trying to tell that young man on the hospital bed, the man I had just brought back to life.

"Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place in the family of things."

May You Love in Beauty!

1 comment:

Ramona Daniel Gault said...

Dear Kim, this is magic, discovering this post at 7:15 am, at work and trying to connect meaningfully with what I'm supposed to be doing here. Talk about "killing me softly"! That's what Mary Oliver's poems do to me, each and every one. Thank you for sharing this one, and do you think the young man in your dream is yourself? You have journeyed far in the past year or so. May we all love in beauty...

 
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