From the Archives: Sentimental Blue

[originally posted March 18, 2006]

When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are,
Anything your heart desires will come to you.
If your heart is in your dreams, no request is too extreme ~
When you wish upon a star as dreamers do.
(Fate is kind, she brings to those who love
The sweet fulfillment of their secret longing.)
Like a bolt out of the blue, fate steps in and sees you through ~
When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.

I gave up wondering if I'm a dreaming butterfly a long time ago — a very long time ago. The last time I gave it a thought, I was probably five years old. Somehow, the collective conspiracy of modern civilization — to convince me that everyone around me was awake because they acted as if they were awake — wasn't convincing enough. It seemed quite backwards to me. When I was with these people who were acting as if they were awake, it was like being in a dream — that is, if a "dream" was what they meant when they described one — cold, strange, scary, crazy, not real. That's how I experienced living in their mass-manifested world of "everyday consciousness."

And when I was in the place they said was not awake — or "a dream" — I experienced warmth, familiarity, safety, sanity, reality. Opening my terrestrial body's eyes in the morning brought me feelings of "oh, no, not back here again." Gravity, the need to breathe, shadows, "external" sounds — and time — all rushed back in to take me prisoner again. Everything was disconnected, nothing was related. In fact, it was up to me now to make sense of every thing, rather than being able to relax and fall back in the comfort of simply experiencing every thing being connected. What joy!

I easily remember being in an infant's body in this strange, disconnected place, my terrestrial body's eyes unable to focus, its ears barely able to withstand the painful noises I was later taught to identify as separate "sounds," as I was taught to identify and label patches of light and colour as "that." "What's that?" I was asked over and over again. "Look at that!" I was commanded, over and over again. My body's brain was washed until it was soaked and soggy. I easily remember my frustration at being in the infant's body. Many years, later, in a seldom seen maudlin mood, my parents shared that I was the angriest baby they'd ever seen — that I was born angry, and had tried to slap the doctor first. I almost won.

My own maudlin mood today brought back these and other primal earthly memories. I well remember what I now know as the Risen about me all the time — crowds and crowds of them, laughing and singing, even dancing around my crib, somehow all fitting in the small room, arriving together in clouds and tinkling breezes.

And there were others — "Oh 'tis they, the fey" is how my Irish grandmother referred to them, when she came to visit me and rock in my tiny rocking chair, for years after she had transitioned, which was when I was two. She pretended to disdain them, saying they should be ashamed, and look at their hands, do they never wash them? — all the while her blue eyes twinkling right through the blue aura that surrounded her at all times, looking like one of the votive candles at church I would love to stand before, pondering, silently. They would laugh at her; incredibly high, speeded-up giggling that sounded like the twittering of birds, but nonetheless showed her great respect, like a queen. And she would gesture to them like a queen, hushing them with a finger to her lips while talking to them as if they were cats approaching a sleeping mouse, "Now be still, look at him, the child, your own brother, he's had a long journey already and a longer one yet ahead, so be still and none of your nonsense, see how tired he is." And they would carry me away for awhile, somewhere, where reality is far more real than what's allowed in the terrestrial realms by the Higher Ones, their own gods and goddesses. They taught me to sing, and made me join their tribal dancing, carried out in fields to the sounds of a thousand drums, stamping designs in the wheat and grass. They would bring me back always in time to see the sun come up — and I would weep — bitter tears that old people cry after watching everyone die, one by one, and leave them, alone in the world of solidified dreams, otherwise known as "reality."

The thing called "time" was a tricky one to get the hang of. The nuns even made little cardboard clocks with movable hands that we had to learn how to manipulate so we could "tell time." I thought it was some kind of representation of the sun. "Go on, tell me the time!" they'd demand, over and over. I thought they meant "tell me the time (when) . . . " — and I'd get so confused and ask them, "tell you the time what?" I thought they wanted me to tell them a story. And they would roll their eyes and make their lips thin and the fey would mock them, rolling their eyes and sticking their fingers in their noses and making me laugh. Then the ruler would appear somewhere out of those voluminous black sleeves, and my desk would receive a loud crack! and the fey would sprout wings and fly into the crack between the two enormous pieces of black slate on the wall, sending chalk dust out in tiny puffs apparently only I could see. "Look at me when I'm talking to you! Now tell me the time!" (Tell you the time what?)

This thing time, what it is, still occupies my thoughts a great deal. I finally understand that it's an illusion, which I can tell is so because it takes time for water to fill the glass, it takes time for me to drink it, and it takes time for me to send it back into the special bowl placed in the special room for that purpose only. Where I experience reality, there is no time to take, no time to give, reality simply is. There is joy. It is not half-full, or half-empty. Joy is present, always. I cannot put it into better words than that for you.

And it seemed to me, until quite recently, that this illusion of time, which is used for everything here, was quite useless. Because we are taught to unconnect everything, time is the result, and time is then the means to try to reconnect it all. Of course, since it's not disconnected really, it's just a game we play with ourselves and each other. Unless it's used for something. And what time can be used for, perhaps what it's meant to be used for, is to experience the joy that is eternally present. Not to just experience it in a different way, but to be able to access it and then experience it at all, here, in this dream. So when I'm filling the glass with water, I have time to put joy into filling the glass. I have time to put joy into drinking the water, and I can even use my time to en-joy a luxurious pee. And the very act of putting joy — that is, en-joying — into anything allows us to feel joy. This is, obviously, a choice we have — free will, in fact. Anything can be experienced as joyful, or joyless.

Where there is no time, joy is felt always. Time isn't needed to feel joy when everything is experienced as connected. It doesn't take anything to be connected, because everything is connected and adds up to one infinite, endless thing; one thing is everything.