I have been yelling and screaming at the people around me. A veritable temper tantrum. Now I am trying to remain hidden from them all, feeling threatened. I am curled in a ball under a table with some sort of thin netting over me. It is hardly adequate, but I am banking on the fact that they will not come into this room and find me. I know that I have ruined my chances for advancement. All will go forward without me, but I could keep silent no longer. I let my anger and outrage, outrage!, get the better of me. Now I am fearful of the consequences and in hiding. A very large figure comes into the room. His energy is hostile, and his tread makes the floor shiver as if an earthquake; I am found. His weapons are words. I remain silent.
Drift away. After a swirling soup of vagrant images, the scene solidifies and…
I am trying to fly a plane upwards and out of a building. Although I know I am a certified pilot, I am having difficulty; I keep using the wrong pedals — for steering, for upward thrust. The wings scrape the curved walls of the interior. I am too low.
Just at the last moment, as I am going to crash, I find the right pedals; the plane soars upward and steers towards open space, up and out of the confinement of that building.
When I wake in the morning and remember the dream, I am surprised by the aircraft. Usually, in my flying dreams, it’s just me in my body –no flying carpet, bird, or plane involved. But I have been plagued by uncomfortable dreams recently since my latest blunder. The earlier dream, the one where I am so angry, makes me sad. I rail and quail nakedly in my dream life.
Ironically, shortly after posting about Harmonic Relationships, I mindlessly, certainly not mindfully, offended and annoyed my older brother. He pointed out to me that I do not “practice what I preach,” reminding me that I had not responded to a significant email he had sent me two months earlier in which he was requesting we re-open a dialogue.
And he was right. While I had read the communication in question, I had not recognized its significance nor responded to it. This was a mistake, a blunder. I know better. And it has haunted me since he pointed it out. I am not perfect. No one is. In fact:
There is no such thing as “perfect” or “perfection,” really.
Taking that as a given, then, how do we deal with ourselves — and others — as we blunder through life, hurting others, being mindless, and causing pain where none was intended. We/I can all intend and try to be “mindful,” “thoughtful,” etc., but…
Many things can be true. One truth does not cancel out another; I do not have to do the other wrong to be right — and vice versa. It is, as stated in The Way of Beauty, a both/and universe. My blunders do not cancel out my attempt to live in and cultivate Beauty. And while not attempting to justify my inconsiderate omission in my brother’s case, I was at the time deeply involved with other things. And, of course, that is a justification; there are always “reasons.” My blunders do make me a “messy human,” as Mark Nepo might say. Or, to more correctly quote him, “it is messy and magnificent to be human.”
So while my conscience and heart, my eye and hand, aspire to create True Beauty — my dreams, my family, my friends, and my immediate environment act as my yardsticks. I must (continue to) deal with how I react and respond to my messy and mess-creating blunders. I try to be kind to myself.
I am grateful that at least I have a path I aspire to follow, even though I often lose it in the jumble and jungle of everyday living.
