Do you ever get the feeling that you're floating? I do. Constantly. I find myself flying around the room like a Goldfinch. It usually happens when I'm trying to fall asleep amid the dead quiet of night, when I can hear trains that are several miles away and the street in the front yard is dead quiet.
I guess I should really be starting at the beginning. I don't sleep very well. Never mind you who I am; that is if little importance and beyond the portal of sleep inconsequential. We do not own our dreams. Our dreams our borrowed real estate. We build things on them, maybe a house, a belief or a hope, but how long can we hold them until we lose them? I once heard someone say that sleep is a genius notion. It allows us to slip into ourselves and see who we truly are.
We are not who we think we are though. We are God's creations. Mailable flesh formed over bones that we believe to have been relics of people who were not saints. From the beginning of time we were not perfect. It's not our fault; not his, nor hers. It's a flaw in the design; we were not built for eternity as we are. We must be reminded of what it was that they learned so long ago; that we are not perfect. We can not live forever.
It seems that we are born without this concept. We drink wine and break bread and talk about the fact that we oxidize with time and become fragile. Some of us become fragile when we are young and some of us live long and fulfilling lives; the tricky part is that we don't know which we have. Neither does anyone else. Which is why I lay in bed and can not sleep. And I think about the dreams that I do not touch. They are worse than films; a film we can handle, rewind and examine. Dreams we can not; they are not tangible, yet we talk about them as things that belong to us.
Waking means that we have to give them up. It means that we have to practice being alive. we have to experince pain, trust, love and forgiveness. I don't know that we can really ever touch these things either, however, they can be gifted, transfered and accepted.
They are also the most difficult things we have. Difficult to understand, accept and give. we can not put them on a shelf and look at them. We doen't truely know if they can be saved for posterity. We can't even see them in the literal sense. The best we can do is to have faith that they do indeed exist. This is what makes them difficult. We have to look harder for evidence of these things in the world.
It's there. Miles Davis. Fingers.Sideways glances. Gentle smiles. this is a list that could go on and on. These are things that are here for us in all the moments when we become scared and unsure about the intangible things of this world. they are also things that help us heal heart and scars. They also help us fall asleep.
?They are God's creations, his gifts. They are what he gives us so that we can stop thinking in the middle of the night when we can't sleep. When I remember that these things exist I feel better about things. I know that I don't have to understand the world. I can't understand the world. There is no need to because just exploring it's possibilities can be enough.
When I feel myself flying around the room like a Goldfinch, I think of these things and I know that I am not alone in the world, even if I am lonely. I have the majesty of the simple things of the world. And if I can't call asleep I can go outside, let the dense, cold November air into my lungs and know that it is good to weighed down by the world. It is exactly that weight that lets me know that the world is not for me alone and I don't need what dreams may come to let me know that I am alive. There is nothing that I really need to do but open my eyes to the wonderment of what I will se in the short time that I will be here.
