Joyful and jovial

 

My rendering from 2013 life drawing classes. 

     What a wonderful humor in which to awaken.  I credit the blessed season.  

     Lord I pray for the travelers and visitors today, wherever, whoever.  May they be safe, content, and loved in their process; may they take a thought of the travelers to Bethlehem whom we commemorate with many of our journeys this week. And Lord shift us past the awful perils that we create with our travels in the wide world, especially now. IJN

     My dreams often make narratives that are more or less comprehendible to me, packed with symbolism and bits of Scrooge’s “underdone potato,” ie trivial recent impressions.  They can entertain me, even if I don’t resist making meaning of them.  Then, psychologists say dreams access subconscious, and Gurdjieff pegs subconscious as our real, primary thinking center.  Bottom line, I may be rationalizing writing my ephemeries, which, for all I really know, consist of momentary, worthless vapors. That said, this morning I dreamt….

     I was contemplating joining a spa which promised to reduce me to perfect body size and to set me on the “right” contemplative path.  Oh, and can my three sisters join in? Of course, and look, I was immediately made skinny and the spa acolytes were beginning to work on my transformation.  At which point one sister whinged she wasn’t getting the full treatment, and I replied, “That’s ok.  It’s fair.  I’m the one with the money. I’m the one who will pay for a whole program.  How much do you expect for free?”  

     So I was as skinny and barefooted as  spa graduates began to coat me in Will Farrell’s handsome green plaid sports jacket from movie “Elf” and to cut off chunks of my shiny dark brown hair.  The women epitomized the program’s ideal.  They looked like daughters of Akhenaten: unsmiling, emaciated, ascetic, shoeless, naked, bald, long headed.  The haircut they started left grizzly gray shocks on my head, going for bald from the short pixie style of my youth.  “Are you sure this is what you want?” asked sister D, and she stopped me in my tracks, just in time.  “No.  I don’t want to walk around naked all the time.,” said I, and told the manager, “I’ll let you know my decision.”  I thought, is not this a path to sanctimony, not sanctification?  Caveat emptor.  The sample was ample.

     Lord, I really hate to think I’m still a “seeker,” not a “finder,” by now. My dreamt dialogue with sister C is surely a subconscious key as to why that is so. Forgive my meanness and hubris which hides from friends in the conscious world, but reveals itself in my subconscious.  Help me to do better, to treat others universally kindly.  IJN