Dreams Composted

Bless me reader for I have sinned, it has been almost two months since my last blogfession.

I am sure you are out there, disgruntled, muttering, "And what kept you, eh?"

All two of you who even know about this blog that is.

Well, bugger, I'm not even going to offer you an apology. Life over the last two months has been like a high speed luge ride. You try typing when sliding down an icy maze and speeds so fast they make your hair hurt. Not that things have been bad, mind you. Just full of rapid unexpected change.

There's an oxymoron, unexpected change. The very thing that we should always expect, regardless of any other belief or hope, is change. And yet, still we toil away building our sand castles beneath the breakers and profess such outrage when our moats and turrets are swept away.

So here I am, bewildered but not beaten, facing a whole new set of challenges. Yippee.

Because I am sadistic and capricious I'm not going to go any further in describing the mundane circumstances of my changed fate. Instead I'm going to write about a dream I had about a week ago that has been lingering about my semi-consciousness  in hope of more attention. I should mention that I frequently dream in Gaudi-like worlds of fantastic beauty, terror, and overabundance. Often my dreams barely tilt their hat at the confines of what we like to call"reality" and instead take off into a Jungian, Campbell-like world of symbols and grandeur. Sometimes I am not myself at all, but a spirit hovering about the life of another person in another time, watching as they meet out their days on this earth from cradle to grave.

This dream was somewhere between the two. As you will quickly deduce, it is heavily based on my own life, and yet not my life, not this world. I love it.

Here goes.

I was born and raised in the circus. Nature and nurture combined to make me a superlative performer, skilled on multiple apparatus, and a riveting showperson (was I male or female, not sure). I loved my life, my rising stardom, the glittering world of show in which I was something special.

Then one day I fell. Just an accident. The kind of thing that isn't really anyone's fault but makes people shrug and say... "sometimes these things just happen."

It happened to me and I was damaged, permanently. All my hard work, all my dreams, my entire identity was gone. Having no other skills or knowledge of the world I was largely unemployable, but my friends at the circus had pity on me and employed me has the janitor at the training facility. All day I mopped floors, cleaned up sweaty towels, fixed leaky toilets, watching the young and able-bodies aspirants around me as they hoisted their bodies into divine positions, over and over again. The younger ones did not remember my days of glory, and ran by me without a word. Some whispered stories about me behind my back, others talked to me with that barely concealed impatience that is reserved for those who everybody knows is without use or purpose in life. I was numb.

Then, while cleaning out a back room one day, I came across an old album of clippings, photographs, and writing. Limping off to a secluded corner I began to read it. I was clearly the property of Alberto, a Mexican stiltwalker who was a good friend of my father's).**

I did not know my father well, he had left when I was still a small child and gone to perform in Europe. We never heard from him again. Going through Alberto's book I found pictures of my father taken long after he had left, pictures of him with Alberto in a colossal and  exquisite theater, somewhere in Europe. At that moment I know that I had to go find my father and restart my life elsewhere. I could not continue to be defined by this injury that I was allowing to shape my body and my life.

How I arrived in Europe, and which city I went to, are both unclear. Something my imagination will have to fill in should I decide to further work this story (which is clearly why the story came to me in the first place). I disembarked to find the city decimated by a new drug that had hit the streets and spread through the region like the plague. It seemed to be something akin to Ayuhuasca or San Pedro. It stripped away all ability for pretence, making people raw. One would expect a city of barbaric animals but the drug also gave people the ability to see the divine. They were living between worlds, surviving on grace alone, wild in the streets which had broken through with plants, trees, and jurassic vines that embraced buildings, lampposts, and the skeletons of unused motor vehicles.

I saw grand society ladies huddled around campfires with thugs and grizzled warriors. They looked right through each other, into each other, and saw each other's past lives like reflections in a pair of mirrors, only changing slightly with each repetition.

The city made me feel alive like I hadn't felt since my accident. More alive. The ground beneath my feet was breathing and I slipped through the streets, between the phantasms that were the city's residents, in an ecstasy. I knew that I was in pursuit of my destiny, the reason for my existence.

With the help of an old map I found the theater. It was towering, seats covered in napped old red velvet stacked in tiers up into the darkness of the distant domed ceiling. Somehow trees had grown up within and around the theater, replacing its walls and part of the roof with towering trunks and canopies the size of a city block. The scale dwarfed even the tallest man, and yet it was the perfect stage, rigged with vines and lit by speckled spots of light from the distant sun or moon.

I knew that my father was here, somewhere, still at work creating spectacle, leading the people through this underworld journey. I just had to find him, and find my part, the part written for me.



**Note: My father actually did have a friend named Alberto from Mexico who I believe became a politician in his home state. He helped my parents replaster the ceiling of my childhood home by walking on stilts instead of relying on a ladder.