Morning Musings!!

Morning Musings

I dream of my mother, of missing her.

I sob in the dream.   I am younger and have been received into a lovely family,

and given a room with a deck, private bathroom, and doors and walls open to the room downstairs and the outdoors.  I can fill it as I please.   Money is no object.   What does that mean?  I have more than is represented in tables and chairs.  I have enough to sit like a cake in an oven, baked, still warm, unsliced.     

“I miss my mother,” I say as they all hear me crying and come to comfort.

“There is more,” they keep chanting.  “There is more behind the tears.”

I try to explain to them that I need some time for aloneness, need to close my door, and I appreciate that they have given me this lovely room but it has no privacy, no door to close, no wall.  They huddle even closer to my side.  A cat fills my lap.  

And then, I wake.   I still see the arch of the open door, the open side of the room.  In the dream, I kept thinking I could hang a blanket over it as a sign of my need for privacy, of my announcement of enough. 

I sit now wondering, what is the more behind the tears.

Jane and I have been discussing this subject of “privacy,” of whether to open Connection Well up or keep it closed.  I saw Julia Cameron speak last night, the author and creator of The Artist’s Way, the Morning Pages.   She is promoting her latest book on writing your way through the morning pages to the right weight, on how having a creative outlet means the pounds fall off, but she is heavy and talks mainly of how she struggles with weight.  She is charming, honest, open.  She is on medication that keeps her from having a nervous breakdown and that means she gains weight.   When she tries to switch from that medication, again she breaks down and is checked into a hospital. 

I am not clear what it means to have a nervous breakdown.  She is incredibly funny as she speaks but her face stays serious, her eyes look into ours, and strike with a tragic, sad match.    Her face and the weariness in her walk are with me.   She is heavy with pain, I realize now as I type this, even as she continues to make others laugh.

I interpret my dream like this.  I love openness, breezes blowing through, nature, decks, and I need a place to sit huddled at times.  I noticed when I drove to Book Passage last night that it is already light longer, but when we came out at nine, it was dark and I felt tired, ready to snuggle into my nest.  Now, the fog is in so tightly, I am a burrito, wrapped.  I can see no further than the end of my deck.  Nature gives me a cocoon into which to wake. 

I feel as sensitive as the wet wings of the butterfly when they realize the cocoon is gone and reach tentatively to stretch.

I feel for Julia Cameron.  She has been honest in her struggle.  She does not hide.  Her eyes are open, intelligent, direct. What does that mean for each of us, this opening of windows and doors, this need sometimes to wrap fetal and the need, also, to fly.

What is it to promote one’s book?  She looked exhausted.  She is almost sixty, so we are close in age and she seems haunted to do good, to deliver her message.  She believes in Morning Pages, hand-written, each morning, private, free-flow.  I have journals of morning pages downstairs from years ago.   When I came to treatment for cancer, my body was opened up, my life.  That is when I began this blog.  My journal became public, and I would never go back to the other way, never, and, so now, I share perhaps more than interests you and that is okay.  We each choose when to open and close the door.

We have had a front door with a half-window for thirty years.  It was here when we came.  We are changing it now to a full window door, clear glass.  Isn’t that what aging brings?