Be careful what you wish for

I had a terrible dream this morning, the type from which and for which
there is no comfort.

It was terrible in the ancient sense, as in 'unavoidably powerful'. Though I immediately devoted myself to hard outdoor chores this morning to work it off, hours later I am still shaken by it.

The dream offered me something I very much wanted, a 'deepest desire'. I felt a great joy and satisfaction, a deep cleansing relief and fulfillment. It was glorious. Then, the next moment, even before I awoke from it the dream gave me the sure knowledge that such satisfaction would never occur.

It was a one-two punch, body blows, a sucker punch in a way because it set me up with ecstasy then laid me out with despair.

This experience was so powerful that I feel like I have to keep moving to keep away from it. Hard work and loud music help distract me from it. But I also feel I have to write about it, so as to in some small way dispel the cloud of disappointment it burdened me with.

I have spent a considerable chunk of my life pursuing dreams, or more accurately the understanding of dreams -- keeping a dream journal, learning how to encourage lucid dreaming. I have always been fascinated by how much our dreamtime works into and affects our waking time. Dreamtime is often described in terms of ideals: we speak of our dream home, dream job, dream mate... Dreams are often presented as superior to regular life, special. People seek to enter their dreams through meditation or drugs; they sometimes enter their dreams through insanity.

And sometimes dreams are thrust upon us vividly and unexpectedly, and more powerfully than we could have foreseen.

I have had frustrating frustration dreams before, everyone has -- trying to achieve something but failing because your limbs suddenly act like soft rubber, having the perfect song or story dwindle away to a thin shadow in memory upon waking.

But this dream was and is far worse -- I can feel this instant very clearly the luminous joy, the feeling of receiving a desired gift, the transportative delight. And just as clearly the devastation of the dream removed and denied.

Be careful what you wish for, for you may get it. But only for a little while.

Along the way home

So I am tooling along Tramway Road this evening. And why was it, I have to wonder, that it took me so long to start using this path to and from work, rather than driving on the interstates? I used to get to work white-knuckled and rather peevish due to the casual threats against life and limb that we euphemistically call the daily commute. But now... Now that I have finally wised up and go the way that takes a little longer, now I get to work much calmer. And my going home is a joy.

Along my new route, in the morning I am greeted by the rising of a pair of peaks in the Manzanos which perfectly resemble perky breasts; each evening I see the setting of the great basalt nipple of Cabezon Peak. Along the way I see open mesa (all blessings upon Sandia Pueblo for preserving their open space), buffalo (again, thanks to the Sandia folk), the ever-changing painting of the Sandia Mountains, cacti, birds... Even along the built-up stretches of Tramway the pace is slower and the views superior to the freeways -- walkers, joggers, skaters, and cyclists throng the roadside paths, and there is the rolling panel of the mountains at one hand and a view across the city at the other. All in all, far preferable to the tight concreted death race of the freeway.

This evening the view can only be called spectacular. As I round the curve below the Tramway proper and head west, the full vista presents itself and I gasp and verbally applaud and as soon as I safely can pull over beside the road to give the spectacle the consideration it deserves.

I kick back across the hood of the car, the windshield a comfortable angle behind my back, and take it all in.

There is a great gray sponge of stormcloud central in the sky, filtering the sunset through its core. Beams of yellow-gold light -- seven, no now eight, no, ten -- radiate out, spokes around the hub, a great wheel slowly rolling across the landscape, each spoke spotlighting a patch of land. Beyond, Mt. Taylor is almost obscured by a shifting veil of virga rain, those impossible (to Easterners, at least) feathers of rainfall that evaporate before reaching the ground. The veils are one moment gray, then the next cream, then the next pink -- who says we don't get the aurora borealis this far south?

I lounge upon the car, a warm breeze across me. Cars whoosh past upon the road. I cannot see their drivers, the windshields are blank reflections, so they are mere machines. Only the bicyclist who speeds by is real, and the hawk who soars over -- real, because we are feeling the same wind. Inside the machine-boxes there is only machine wind.

With just a small bit of myself -- the rest is within the clouds, and the sunspokes, and the wind -- I wonder of the passing cars and their empty occupants:

What moment are you speeding toward, that is so much better than this one?

My mind and my gaze turn to Mt. Taylor, gone now, the horizon featureless. The rain has dissolved it. I have faith that it shall reform as it was, or even grander -- I plan to visit there again soon, to put foot to the outlines that I see in the distance each day. The very tip of Cabezon is still visible, nipple blushing in sunset fire, and there too I plan to be soon -- all my life in New Mexico, and I have never scrambled to the top of that volcanic plug. I want to see the view from up there. I want to be able, as I watch it set each evening, to know what each end of that view looks like. All my thoughts are of horizons, it seems.

A few fat warm spatters of rain fall upon me, in no way objectionable. But now the hub of the wheel is closed and the spokes of light are withdrawn and I have chores waiting and I reluctantly get back into my machine box and get back on the road.

But I turn off the machine-wind inside and roll down the windows as I go. And my hand porpoises in the slipstream of air past the window. And I call hello to the buffalo when I pass.

Icebergs in the desert

There are some plants I pay attention to along my daily commute route. (I tend to focus on natural things along the way, in denial of the many ugly human constructions.)

One in particular caught my eye this morning, not far from my home, a yucca in the median near a major intersection. It seemingly overnight has put out an arm-thick flowering stalk five feet tall. Besides the shocking suddenness of the growth, allowed by recent rains and typical of desert plants seizing opportunity, the remarkable thing about the yucca is the proportion of stalk to plant -- the plant itself is only up to my knees, whereas the stalk will soon be over my head and obviously masses more than the plant. It looks as though the first wind would topple it top-heavy out of the ground.

But the yucca persists through traffic and wind. So there must be much more plant beneath the ground level to anchor the mast of the stalk.

There are many desert plants like this. The bush morning glory is just a dry bundle of twigs through the winter, then in the spring a finger-thick stalk emerges to spread rapidly. But beneath the ground the root of the plant -- what must be considered the plant itself -- may be larger than a man. It stores away moisture in a tough fibrous mass, only raising what we think of as the plant above the surface when conditions are right. And, when conditions are poor, the plant may not emerge at all until the next season.

These are the icebergs of the desert, only the tip revealed of a much larger mass below. Each time I pass the yucca, I now ponder what other things I pass by that only show their tips, even what parts of people I never see because I see only the obvious.

What am I missing, down there under the surface, while I am distracted by what is above?

Glorious. Just glorious.

There's an old saying to the effect that "The devil's in the details".

Wrong. The details are glorious. All the myriad bits and pieces which make up this and each moment of our reality.

I don't particularly care who or what created our universe. Nor do I spend much time thinking about it, any more.

I think many people who spend a lot of time arguing the point are actually wasting valuable energy. Energy they could devote to appreciating their existence, rather than trying to dissect it.

Me, I try to be appreciative every day.

And my appreciation is sharpened, in focus. In new and fresh relief, aided by new eyewear. But the lenses are just a tool to remind me of what I already know:

It's a beautiful world we live in.

Of the silvery moon

I am looking forward to swooning, soon.

This might seem a strange thing -- to hear a large hairy straight male speaking of "swooning". And what's more, with pleased anticipation.

But the word has two meanings. First in most people's minds is "to faint". But the other meaning is mine:

"To be overwhelmed with ecstatic joy."

That is what I am looking forward to. And that is why I am taking the time to explain this aspect of the word, and take it back for all humanity from its connotations of wimpiness.

(Though I have an interesting ally in this effort. Harry Potter, termed "The Boy Who Lived" in the books, might as well be called "The Boy Who Swoons", though in the sense of the first definition -- he passes out more than a Jane Austen girl, 3 or 4 times per book. Granted, magic is weighty and mysterious stuff. But still I smile to think of a whole generation of readers, young males included, being subtly indoctrinated that it is all right for even such a hero to swoon without rebuke.)

The reason I am sure that I will soon swoon: tomorrow I pick up my new eyeglasses. And I know from experience that to look at the world through new lenses brings me first to giddiness at the clarity of things, then a state of ecstasy as the incredible detail of existence pours over and into me.

I will become enrapt over the minutiae of reality, created just for that moment, my already sharp appreciation brought into renewed focus.

I will be struck anew, in stunned awe, by sky and cloud and mountain and tree and the gleam of sun on hair and the curve of a woman's cheek as she smiles.

I will become lost in each great new vista, just as in each grain of sand.

And I know I will wear a great beaming grin.

And I will swoon.

And if you would think to mock me for my delight in the sheer brilliance of the universe, would think to belittle me that I could find ecstasy in such a simple acknowledgment of existence, I will ask you:

How can you not be ecstatic?

Oh my aching credulity

Oh my aching credulity

I was around for the first wave of silliness about the Mayan calendar predicting the end of the world in 2012.

Now there is a whole new resurgence in this theme, with several new books and popular coverage of the idea that Dec. 2012 will bring, if not an apocalypse, at least a major "shift" in human affairs.

As if that were not bad enough, I just saw that someone is trying to stitch together Nostradamus and 2012!

Of course, it is a perfect match -- the ambiguous maunderings of a famous "prophet", glued to the ambiguous "end of a cycle" of a mysterious lost people. Nostradamus' enigmatic quatrains perfectly lend themselves to a wide variety of interpretations (I have seen the same passage claimed to predict a female U.S. president, and a financial collapse), and anything "Mayan" excites new agers to drooling.

But I have to ask two questions:

1) Why is it people are so willing to look forward to an apocalypse in their lifetimes?

and

2) Why do people feel so lost that they will accept any framework, even a pessimistic one, to hang a belief system on?

I have my theories, but for now I just have to shake my head.

Personally, I am looking forward to 2013. And I wonder what satisfaction they get in believing it will not arrive.

2009. In with a bang. Many bangs.

The new year commenced with a bang. Many, many bangs, thanks to my neighbors.

If one has witnessed something annually for more than 20 years, it must be safe to call it a tradition. The tradition in rural New Mexico is to step outside at 11:59 on the evening of Dec. 31 and unload all of your weapons into the air. Pistols, shotguns, rifles, black powder weapons -- once you get over it sounding like a war zone, it is sort of a fun game to identify all of the different calibers and guns. That sounds like a 9mm, 17 in the clip. There's an old double-barrel shotgun, sounds like a 12-gauge, double-roaring, then, after a reload, double-roaring again. There's a .22, sounding rather like a cap-gun by comparison, ripping through a clip of 20.

(One odd thing this year -- out of the background noise I kept hearing 5 barking shots, 1-2-3-4-5, then a hesitation for reload, then 1-2-3-4-5 again. What uses a 5-round clip? An old strip-clip military weapon, like a Garand?)

Of course, while listening to all of this I am safely under cover, since what goes up inevitably comes down somewhere, and yes I know there is a lot of open space around here and yes I know the odds against getting hit are favorable but there is a lot of lead failing to reach escape velocity and I have only to look at the bullet-pock on the side of the house from New Year's Eve 2000 to be reminded that statistics are not the only consideration in life.

I must admit, I have been tempted to add to the sonic mess, shooting not recklessly into the air but safely into a pile of dirt but since the whole point seems to be recklessness I feel it would be an empty gesture. I will not be a would-be wanton; when I am wanton I do it right.

After years of being exposed to this annual barrage, I have come to believe that it is the result of superstition. Apparently my neighbors, and their counterparts across the area, believe that if you have any ammo left unused on Jan. 1 you won't get any more in the coming year.

(Note to sociologists: when there is a regularly-observed practiced you cannot decipher, chalk it up to superstition.)

Last night's barrage was especially memorable. Amid the booming and banging of ordnance were leftover July fireworks, adding to the battlefield illuminations. Too, party noisemakers could be heard, tooting and screeching. (And, where commercial noisemakers were not at hand, several people voicing vigorously through duck calls.)

But rising above it all, soaring, was the sound that made me burst out laughing, the clarion call that I have taken to heart and now hold as my sonic theme for the coming year:

The clear, proud, defiant call of a rooster, knowing that it is his job to crow up the sun.