What If Dreams Are All You Have?

I was watching an old movie, and one of the characters said, “You can’t live on your dreams. You have to let go of your dreams and come into the present. Live today. You can’t live on your dreams.” I find myself chuckling and thinking that’s another one of those things where you do an about face as you get older and come back to the starting point again, because after a while, dreams are all you really have to live on. Your dreams become more real than experiences around you, and those are the things that encourage you and keep you going, because you think dreams – at least the pleasant ones – are just pictures of the world to come, which I trust is a return to the garden, to paradise, to place without strife, disharmony, confusion -- all those things that make the journey here so difficult and tend to take away from the joy of the occasion. Dreams --especially as you near the end of the journey -- become more real because they are pictures of what’s coming, and the closer we get to that event, the clearer they become. Dreams are important parts of our journey, from the beginning until the end.

No Wonder We Groan

There are days when I get so frustrated by every tiny inconvenience -- spilling something, or not being able to open a medicine bottle because they make them now with child-proof caps -- that I find myself laughing. It’s becoming clear that I must be getting close to the end of the journey, because nobody could be this impatient without being close.

Fetuses are for the womb but babies are for the world, and when it’s time to move on, you are really ready for it. I feel every bit as constricted as I must have in my mother’s womb those last days, and I know how eager she must have been for me to get the hell out of there. I am tired of living in a world where shit happens. I want it to be perfect all the time. Just once, I’d like to go through one experience and not be irritated or frustrated by something that happens or doesn’t happen and destroys the peace of that moment.

I sense that the whole world shares this frustration. The Bible speaks of all creation groaning in travail, in labor, awaiting the day of deliverance of that new creation. The whole world has groaned since the beginning of time, because there’s always a generation in the world at any given moment that is just about ready to leave. The rest of the world is groaning for other reasons, which are called growing pains, but the whole world is groaning in pain, not necessarily of body, but of soul and spirit, because we all miss home the whole time we’re here.

No wonder we groan so much. You really get tired of all this, and I’m looking forward, in my own quiet, grateful, contented way, to the great event when I can finally get the hell out of here.

Joined By a World Between

I notice how I’ve begun avoiding words like “painful,” because I’m beginning to see pain in a different light. That goes for words like “good” and “bad,” or “good” and “evil.” These words just represent different sides of the very same coin. They’re not mutually exclusive. They may be polar opposites, but they’re joined by a world in between.

Throught a Glass, All Too Brightly

When the summer heat comes to Palm Springs, I’m usually confined to the indoors, as most of us are. It’s the only way that you survive the desert unless you’re genetically equipped to deal with the heat.

As I went to the refrigerator one day to get some more lemonade and vodka, as the temperature neared 115, I opened the curtains and looked out into my garden. I immediately had a thought, or perhaps had a thought given to me, in the form of metaphor that expresses how I feel at this point in my life.

I feel as though I’m looking through a glass at heaven. It’s right there in front of me. It’s just as clear as can be. The problem is that all I can do is glimpse it occasionally. I can’t yet in anyway possess it or actually enter into it. I’m stuck on the other side of the glass looking through it at where I want to be – the Garden.

“That’s where I want to be and that’s where I’m going to be,” I think. Eventually this division will be gone. It will be cool enough outdoors that I can go right out into the Garden without feeling as though I’ve walked into a blast furnace, and in that day I will open the door, or it will have it opened for me, and I will walk out into the cool beauty of the Garden, bless it forever. In the meantime, I’m kind of stuck here, in my very pleasant minimum-security prison.

Of course, I’m very grateful to God, or the goddess, or to the Force or Power responsible for all this, because my lot could be much less comfortable.

My trailer is cool, and the air conditioning system hasn’t broken down yet. It will eventually, like all things in this world, but I don’t live in the past or future anymore, so for today I am grateful that I am so comfortable.

I’m not in any kind of real pain, other than just homesickness. I want to be in heaven, and not here, but I can live with that, because I know it’s coming.

I look around and see my player piano and my piano rolls, which go back to the turn of the 20th century. I’ve got my parent’s old dance records. I’ve got drawers full of wonderful old videos, singing and dancing from the golden age of Hollywood and around the world.

My bed is comfortable. I have food in the refrigerator, sun in the morning, and the moon at night. I got rhythm. I got sweet dreams. Who could ask for anything more? Just ask me.

Ridden Hard, Put Away Wet

I watched an interesting video called “Big Jake,” starring an older John Wayne and an interesting cast, including Richard Boone, John Wayne’s son Patrick, Robert Mitchum’s son, and a bunch of faces that you grew up with at the movies in the 40s and 50s. Here are those faces again, in about 1973, with sagging eyes and stomachs but also a charm that just captivates me.

I’ve always really liked John Wayne. I think he was adorable as a young, tall, lanky cowboy cranking out lots of poverty-row B westerns for nearly 10 years, and he’s just charming in every one of them. You can see what’s coming.

After he was discovered, when he was already getting on in years, he came into his own and had 10 or 15 years of being a top romantic star, playing opposite people like Marlene Dietrich in her heyday and, of course, having affairs with all of his leading ladies.

Now here he is in “Big Jake,” an old man looking for his kidnapped grandson, and he’s got this crew of people going with him. It takes place in 1909, with the last gasps of the old west getting all mixed up with the beginnings of the 20th century, and you begin seeing cars in the westerns, which is so amusing. This movie has a nice script, and it’s interesting to see John Wayne playing the father of his real-life son and of Mitchum’s son.

Listening to the banter between them, I think, “These people knew how to have a good time, and this must have been a fun movie to make, so late in John Wayne’s career and with these other guys’ careers just beginning, and then surrounded by all these other old timers.

You can see the wisdom that has come into the old guys’ faces and the irony in their acting that wasn’t there 20 or 30 before. You can see that a lot of them had lived really hard lives, but that they had aged pretty well and looked as if they had enjoyed life and lived it to the fullest -- ridden hard and put away wet, maybe, but they enjoyed it.

That’s what I love to see on the faces and in the eyes of these people who the world says really blew it or lost it. That’s not what I see. I see people who had as good a time as they possibly could, which meant that there was a lot of bad to go with it, but they seem to be balanced. You want a lot of joy in your life? OK, the trade-off is that there’s going to be a lot of shit in your life. If you just plod through life in the mediocre middle of the road, maybe you haven’t had a lot of intense pain, but you probably haven’t had a lot of intense joy, either. You’re just not capable of feeling with one very intensely, you lucky sons of bitches!

Look Into Your Eyes

It’s wonderful to look into one’s own eyes and see the glory that is writ there by God’s hand, and to feel love again, love coming from within, because that’s where love always is. It’s other places as well, but it’s always within us. We just don’t recognize it. I look into the mirror and see the eyes of an old guy, and a bald head, and a scruffy beard that won’t grow dark and thick like I’d like it too, and all the rest of this “house,” and to see how it has changed over the decades, adapting to its duties at any given point in my life. How different a body we need at 20 than at 50, or 80. Being the living organism that it is, the body continues to change, age, and evolve throughout our lifetime, and like all of life, it just becomes increasingly ironic to most of us, it we live long enough, to find ourselves trapped in this body that we didn’t ask for. This is the one we were given. In spite all that, I’m able to love a body that I had nothing to do with making or maintaining. The years that I was the most abusive to it, it did just fine, and the years that I was the most kind to it, it just rebelled every possible way, so please, no more bullshit about how we decide or control the kind of bodies that we are going to have when we’re old. We take what we’re given and make do the best we can. I look at this body and think, well, there it is, for better or for worse, and at least I’ll be leaving it soon, preferably before it stops working altogether, but, you know, if that’s the only way you can make your exit, then yeah, just shut it down. I know that at some point I’m going to open my eyes and slowly begin to realize that I am in a different place. It will look familiar, perhaps I won’t understand, or even need to, that there’s been a return to, what? To eternity? And to know that you’re going to experience existence on a plane unimagined here. I can look into the mirror, into those eyes, and see all of that, and what’s more, I can look into the eyes of others now and see the same God looking back at me, with a sardonic smile on his or her face, and something in the eyes that I may be the only one to see.