Yesterday morning I woke up from a familiar, though thankfully not as common now as it used to be, anxiety dream. These usually take the form of being late to/not finding a classroom where an exam is being proctored. What was unusual about this dream was that I was having trouble finding my way to the first day of class. I had done most of my homework (in finding the location) but when I got where I thought the class was, I was wrong. And all the people who should have been able to help, couldn't.
I'd had a twinge the night before that I needed to start organizing myself a bit more. Keeping ideas in my head was going to become cumbersome, and the dream was just the nudge I needed to get going. But I was also pretty tired, so I delayed getting started for a while and picked up Poetry for the Earth, an anthology I've been dipping into. At the bottom of the first page of the Introduction were these lines from Rainer Maria Rilke's The Eighth Elegy:
We've never, no, not for a single day,
pure space before us, such as that which flowers
endlessly open into.
Pure space. Unencumbered quiet. Pregnant emptiness.
I lay down on the guest room bed, soaking up the sunshine flooding through the windows and closed my eyes. Before I organized my activities, I needed to organize my thoughts. But what if I let them emerge, instead of directing them? My subconscious was obviously tuned into my life - hence the dream - but was there something more, some other ideas which wanted to open, grow, expand and were just waiting for the permission to do so?
The answer was yes. In the quiet, several thoughts came to mind. The importance of an upcoming event solidified, as well as an easy way to double my office space. As I moved into the rest of the day I felt focused and clear. The background noise had been pushed aside; in those peaceful moments there had been pure space before me. And the opening of several buds.
