Sleep Dream. It is an ordinary sort of reality. Not one that I know, but nothing unusual. I realize that very soon, I will die. Not a doctor’s diagnosis, just a crystal clear knowing that my death is imminent. "Finally the time has arrived,“ I think, "soon this life will be done.“ I feel calm and curious. I then proceed to take care of various bits of unfinished business. Nothing great or momentous; more the sense of small chores, misc. loose ends to tie up. It all feels calm, relaxed. An odd sense of being aware that each day could be my last. I feel very present, and that I’m detaching from my life. At some point, a person interacts with me. Do I know her? Friendly. She is aware of my impending death, is perfectly calm in the knowledge. I think she assists me with my errands. A handsome woman of my vintage, grounded, wise. It all feels ordinary and natural.
Dream Associations. It strongly feels like this dream is about the death of old ways of being. My dying to old restrictive and constrictive ways. I do have a strong sense of rebirth. There is a powerful feeling that I am really stepping out of the old shoe box of a life into a broad and fertile space.
I recall how Zaiga would catch the green parakeet each night, shove it into a literal shoe box, put the lidded box on the kitchen table, turn the lights out and shut the door to the dining room. This, instead of buying a cage for the bird. The bird flew freely around the house during the day, shitting and chewing at will. One day I arrived home from school and Zaiga reported that the bird had accidentally gotten out of the house and flown away.
This is a perfect metaphor for so much of what Zaiga taught me, her understanding of Parenting: the goal is to keep the kid as tightly and narrowly confined as possible. Put him inside a moral and emotional shoe box. So many of her ideas have been grotesquely constricting of my life, of Flight. I became inured to life in a shoe box, fearful of Abandonment.
Now I see that, acutally, the shoe box was the real abandonment. But it’s not about tearing outside, flying into an inhospitable, lethal climate, as did the green parakeet. Rather, it’s about creating broad, spacious, hospitable environments wherein I may thrive.