I dream Amazon.com has given me a $10,000 gift card as part of a credit card promotion. I don’t believe it. It has to be fake. When I hit refresh on my internet browser it won’t be there.
But it is.
I let myself get excited, thinking about all the things I can buy. With my lifestyle I can live ove this for Turns. I keep thinking that it’s going to be taken away, that it’s a mistake, but it keeps being proven again and again that it’s real.
At the end of my dream I’m in a cafeteria line and there’s a whole rack of gourmet food that is only 25 cents a serving because it’s a couple of suns old, and I can afford as much as I want. But there are so many choices and I can only fit so much in my belly, and I don’t know what to choose.
When I wake, a bleak grief overwhelms me. It was just a dream. I don’t really have a $10,000 gift card. All my excitement and sense of security weren’t real. The symbolism is obvious, my dreamself’s metaphor for all the abundance around me. But my feeling self doesn’t care. The abundance is not for me.
The abundance is not for me.
We’ve been invited to the Naming Feast of two of our campmates back at Wabanong, and I make the hike toward celebration amid the cheery company of the other Nutters heavy hearted. I gather oxeye daisy, basswood, strawberry, dandelion, plaintain, raspberry, and red clover blossoms for a salad on the way. I want to be present for my campmates in their joy, but as I touch the pain inside me all I can feel is like crying. I find myself irritated by the people around me, judging their small idiosyncrasies and greater patterns.
After the feast Rab and Scott have decided to stay in Wabanong. They’ve learned what they need to learn at Hazelnut Camp. Sewing up my shoe by firelight for my hike back in the overcast dusk, I know that my pain and discomfort mean I am dancing on my edges, on the cusp of a threshold to I know not where.
And I just know– I have to go back.
Interesting post. I’ve dreamt I was granted whatever I wished, and what was it? A whole bunch of food! Not riches, not love or fame. Food. Why? Clearly food has such great significance for our survival and well-being that it is a deeply felt desire in our subconscious.
I’ve seen what you did, living most of the summer on less food than you needed, and resisting the discomfort and hunger to keep doing it, for the spiritual growth and strength it would afford. You did it quietly, privately and mostly alone. I hope that having gone through this as a group it helps you be strong for each other, so that when one needs to cry at a feast, he does not cry alone or uncomforted.