Last night at 10:30, coughing interrupted this dream:

I’m inside an antiquity museum in a Middle Eastern country. A native guide points out the features of the Tree of Jesse, a ceiling-to-floor hand-woven wall hanging, striking for its varied colors of blue. No other tourists are around.

At 7:15 this morning, I made myself open my eyes, despite being deliciously swaddled in effervescent-love. I tingled all over, yet had no recall of the supporting story. From the kitchen came the aroma of simmering quinoa, my breakfast, in the works by my helper. Also astounding was the night of uninterrupted sleep that did nothing for my chronic exhaustion that hangs like widow’s weeds around my psyche.

Yet, the first dream filled me with awe: it felt like I was standing on holy ground, supported by pregnant silence rejoicing in unseen harmonies. The blues of the wall hanging soothed me. At the same time, the guide’s identification of Jesus’s forebears perched upon limbs of the Tree of Jesse quickened me. It felt like I had entered the O Antiphon, Root of Jesse, and again heard its plea:

Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.

And the memory of this morning’s experience still lingers in my psyche: no unmet needs, communion with HP, joy beyond telling—perhaps a foretaste of eternal life; perhaps also an assuagement of recent grief as well as a reminder that suffering is the usual precedent before transition. There are few exceptions.  

So again grounded in the present, I wait and pray with everyone else …