Doves 🕊️

Ten forty.

My friend in Texas lost someone close to her yesterday evening. In general, no one seems really ecstatic with their life right now. But when I went to the store yesterday afternoon I caught sight of Deb, who apparently had recovered from surgery recently. She looks good. I didn’t have a chance to talk with her because she was talking to someone else and I didn’t want to interrupt. Today it’s sunny and the sky is more white than blue. For a long time we hardly saw the sun at all. I am thinking, what usually happens in the middle of April? We already had Easter. In May there’s the Mexican Independence Day, and Mother’s Day and Memorial Day are not far off… I feel pretty tired and it’s getting to be a par for the course, so I cut myself a little slack for being older. One of the doves outdoors calls in a hoarse hooting: do the mourning doves mean anything symbolic? They’ve been hanging out here for a decade. Any meaning I attach to them is imaginative. Carl Jung said to a client, “Here is your scarab.” It was a little beetle rapping at the window while the client had been talking of a scarab. There are different ways to interpret this. I don’t usually go for mysticism, though I know Jung still has a huge following. Psychology as a social science leaves me kind of cold. For a while, though, I was an avid fan of fairytales and folklore, right after I became ill long ago… I don’t know if the doves symbolize something or not. It probably depends on whom you ask.

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Ladybug

Noon.

I was just thinking about how I celebrated Christmas Eve this last year. Instead of going to church, I stayed home with my dog and daydreamed about my late parents: I made it a secular Christmas that my parents would have understood. And I had a good time in my little reverie, with a lighted ceramic tree and a red stocking by the fireplace, the lights dimmed, and so on. I played Santa Claus with my dog, giving him treats out of the stocking as if we’d had a visit from St Nicholas. That evening, the mail carrier brought a belated package, arriving on time for the holiday. When I stepped outside to get it, I found a little ladybug clinging to it like a sign of good fortune. Perhaps it was all in my imagination, and yet I felt happy, for the spirit of Christmas in some form had stopped by my home, unlike a lot of previous holidays when I felt merely hollow and sad.

Dream: Money

Wee hours.

I dreamed I was driving at night up to the Campus. But as I was crossing the Ferry Street Bridge it occurred to me that I had no coins for a parking meter, so how could I stop and get out of the car? I rounded onto Franklin Blvd and pulled into a small lot for a gas station, stopped, and got out. Then I looked in my backseat and found a few quarters at first; yet tipping the seat forward, there was a ton of silver coins: quarters and even silver dollars. I muttered to myself that I had a lot more money than I’d known. And then the dream sort of dissolved or morphed into something else. Now I can ask what the dream means, and is the money literal money or a spiritual kind of currency. Either way, it’s about the resources available to me, like an unconscious treasure, as when Hansel and Gretel find the witch’s hoard of gold and precious gems in her house in the deep dark woods. It’s also like the second part of Faust, where Mephistopheles enriches the land and people can take gold like money growing on trees. I think the silver coins in my dream are an intellectual kind of wealth because my destination was the University. 

Full Moon

Quarter of seven.

At three in the morning I was awoken by what must’ve been the moon. Although I couldn’t see it, it was directly overhead, exerting its magnetic pull on my brain: the same pull that regulates the tides. When it was four thirty I finally saw the full moon in my bedroom window, waning and inclined to the south of the sky. I got up and obtained another view out the kitchen window, around behind the magnolia tree in the predawn darkness. Sometimes this lunar satellite is just a stone that orbits the earth, and others it’s more like a personality, a ghost governing flow and ebb of the oceans. It somehow symbolizes the mind of humankind in its capacity of reflection. I used to believe it was connected with my mother in some way, but with her death twenty years ago, this relation has faded. Now, the moon means something different to me, or perhaps nothing at all; yet it still can wake me up in the middle of the night, wondering how and why. 

Dans la Lune

Quarter of noon. I ate the potato salad like a glutton and opened the mango Snapple. I’m in a weird mood today. I know I’m dreading my procedure a month away, and I wonder how I can weasel out of it. My healthcare insurance people have sent me another package. I imagine it’s a cancer detection kit. I won’t open it for a while… Part of me wishes I could drink beer and really enjoy my life again, but drinking enough is drinking too much. When I start to drink, there’s no way I can stop. Probably I’m just looking for a means of escape from the unpleasant situation. It feels rather cold in here. At the same time, the sun is coming out. I don’t feel as if my life were under my control, but I’m going to do something about that.

Quarter of two. I gave my white Fender bass a good workout, thinking of my old friend JP, a very talented musician who had chronic depression. We met on a beautiful Labor Day in 2003 at his place in the Whitaker neighborhood. His friend Dave was also there and played guitar… I feel very different today. The weather is like spring, a time of rebirth and renewal, but it’s also calling up thoughts and images in my memory. And I ponder why my worldview can’t be Romantic like it was 18 years back. The moon was always a beautiful sight, and the idea of it inspired me with dreams and poetry— and madness. The moon compelled tides of alcoholism the same as the ocean. Eventually I forgot that it exists in the sky or in my mind. I linked the essence of it with my mother somehow. Now it’s merely a stone in the heavens, devoid of personal meaning. Maybe there’s something wrong with that? When I behold the moon above, I’m surprised that it isn’t cracked in two pieces. It has withstood a lot of therapy, but not its copy within my soul. What would it take to restore it to wholeness and light?