Why I Haven't Written in a While

I've been having this strange dream for two weeks now: it lasts all day and well into the night.

In the dream, I went to a huge party. I was deliriously happy. Like only can happen in dreams, I kept seeing people I know or who looked familiar but with the contexts all mixed up: school friends were there with distant relatives, childhood neighbors with current students, people who I know full well live thousands of miles apart standing and chatting with each other. In a similarly dream-like way, the cultural contexts for the party were all mixed up: we'd be dancing to bhangra one minute, to ABBA the next, then to something in Spanish I could almost make out before circling to the strains of Hava Nagila. I was flying, or at least floating, at one point, then Kira was floating above me--there was cake, there were old men and women falling deeper in love with the universe. We walked outside and the stars had come down out of the sky to glow in people's hands--"we" meaning me and this beautiful woman dressed in white with touches of gold, jewelry on her face and around her neck, mehndi on her skin, and my heart wrapped up in her soul. Kira left us, then, to join the night stars and we walked off past the stars, out into the darkness, past what would have been the edges of the universe if the universe had that kind of shape.

The Night the Moon Sank

The moon tonight--I'm not making this up, Nicole saw it, too, and can vouch for me--was a deep yellow when we walked out her house, yellow like you think of the Harvest moon being (though it was at half and not full and it's the summer not fall). Shone clear enough though to make it seem close, like it lived here and not-out-there-in-space, like it meant to hang right across the lake, like across the land across the lake was, in fact, a whole different world, a queendom of the moon--and not just a convenient place for cancerous sub-suburban growth to pave over.

Maybe the moon saw, in her bright yellow glory, that people had taken over her land and that's why she gave up. See--as we stood across the lake from the moon-come-to-earth, Nicole in my arms our eyes on the sky--the moon seemed to start sinking into some clouds and I know, I know you're going to tell me the moon doesn't sink into clouds, winds blow clouds not quite four-hundred-thousand miles in front of the moon's face, so the moon doesn't even notice when she's hidden from our view but I'm telling you, tonight the moon sank.

I was holding Nicole and before our very eyes the moon let herself sink down into the clouds deeper and deeper until they covered her almost completely, until there was nothing to see of her strong yellow light than what looked like a crack in the sky. Yes, the moon let herself sink down and the sky let herself crack and then the crack blacked over and there was nothing left but the night and the stars and the scarred sky and me holding Nicole and wondering what did it mean that this just happened.

Wondering if any second one by one the stars will just start to put themselves out.

Dampening the pillow, but not with drool...

Stayed up late reading Menachem Bloodaxe. I just got to the part where he's hiding from enemies in the cliffs of a fjord, and has to celebrate Hanukah alone in a cave, reduced to using fish oil for the last two days' worth of candles.

I found the passage strangely moving.

Nostalgia

Left work today to step out into a wind. Beautiful, majestic thing—I like to feel wind like that; it reminds me of God. Great, unbidden, beyond you and yet all around you: they have so much in common. And so I danced up to the parking lot, music of the wind in my head and on my body, missing the days when I had long hair that would wrap a bit around my face in a wind like that, and a long beard that tells me at once that I belong to God and that I am free. Missing the days when I could almost believe that such a wind could carry me into the air because body and soul were still one and the same.

Swine Flu Replaced by A New Worry

I am noticing a pattern in myself lately: my body hates mornings even more than usual. At first, I thought it was because I've had trouble sleeping, but I'm noticing that even on nights when I sleep nine or ten hours, I wake up drained. And I'm not the only one struggling: a number of people I know seem to be slowing down and wanting to curl up most of the time.

My theory? Our bodies want to spin chrysalides (yes, that's the plural of chrysalis). And we have to consciously struggle to keep it from happening. Nothing else makes sense, so I'm probably right.

It's tempting to just let it happen: who knows what metamorphoses we might undergo? And yet life seems worth not missing for any extended period of pupation.

Certainly, there are things I'd love to avoid, to be totally separated from by a naturally-produced organic blanket, but what's the point of getting away from those things knowing they'll still be there when I get back? And then there are the lovely things that simply cannot be experienced from a chrysalis at home in bed: playing cows with Kira on the trampoline, sitting in a car in the driveway and listening to the sound of the rain beating down on it, tracing patterns like old Indian mounds as I move my finger across my fiancee's skin.