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At 3 A.M., I awoke to this surprising dream:
It is night. Ellen Sheire, my former Jungian analyst, invited me to join a conference in a foreign city, attended by the most evolved individuals in the world. Dialogue, not discussion, would be the manner of discourse to address seemingly insoluble problems.
In the dream, the night suggests the waning of time and opportunity for change, an apt stricture that surrounds me as I move through each twenty-four hours, homebound. Yet, fresh learning continues seeping through my dreams, my prayer and meditation, and dialogue with my CPA sponsor.
I do not see Ellen Sheire, my former Jungian analyst, in reality, a Zurich-trained practitioner in Vienna, Austria, and in St. Louis, Missouri, now retired, but her invitation in the dream intrigues me. During my work with her in the 1990s, she had urged me to join Jungian tours to prehistoric Sacred places in Europe and to delve onto their mythologies. In this morning’s dream, there’s another such invitation and I’m eager to participate.
The foreign city suggests a place of unfamiliarity with the history and terrain, strangeness of customs, confusion of languages; its advanced technology replete with untried paradigms.
I am alone as I listen to the expertise of the conferees surrounding me. From within fruitful silence emerges fresh ways of considering what it means to be a person in relationship.
Despite the novelty of expression, the primacy of love remains critical.
I still have much to learn, and my inner teachers are enthusiastic for my new willingness. It is still night—No signs of dawn and cessation.
This is it, I said to myself, closing the front door behind me. My cheeks flushed, my breathing quickened. The second look confirmed my decision to lease this two-bedroom bungalow, despite having no experience caring for a house, despite my seventy years of age. Now that I was retired, I needed a quiet place to finish my book. This was 2006.
But I looked around again. The space I could handle, but the rest of the brick bungalow was an eyesore: the appliances, old; the walls painted in the drab colors of nineteenth-century peasants, with the exception of cherry red for the dining room; the hardwood floors, were scuffed and stained where once carpet had lain; discolored blinds, some blades bent, covered the windows. The infrastructure also needed renovation, together with a new roof.
Mature shade trees and perennial flower beds enhanced the exterior, however. Still, I heard myself say, “This is it!”
And the bungalow still is. Everything about it was a challenge from God: to replace the unlovely with beauty; to seek contractors for major repairs; to learn how to care for my bungalow until I’d arranged a circle of helpers. Every room contains multiple stories and when put together, express the woman I have become and who has actualized much of her birthright, before making my transition.
With the renovation of my bungalow complete; with my closets and drawers largely emptied, save for what I’m actually using; with my on-going psychic work protected with solitude and silence; with the bare minimum of loving helpers, most days, I feel deeply content and grateful for new growth. And my simple bungalow serves admirably as the container: God’s preeminent gift.
What could He have in store for me? For all of us?
“There is a season for everything, and a time for every occupation under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die,” a declaration attributed to Qoheleth, a sage by profession and a Palestinian Jew living in the third century BCE. Qoheleth and others developed the Book of Ecclesiastes as a corrective to counter the empty philosophies of Stoicism, Cynicism and Epicureanism that had vulgarized life in Israel and eviscerated traces of the Sacred. Life was empty; knowledge, virtue, love illusory.
Yet, a sense of the Sacred permeates this short book, sacralizing the totality of life: its impetus, Creator God and no other.
Fast forward to the present. Despite later prophetic utterances, even those of the God-Man Jesus of Nazareth, not much has changed, save for solitaries harboring the Sacred within their depths, save for some churches whose Spirit-filled members give thanks and serve with joyful hearts—such is my perception.
I return to yesterday’s green flag and my continuing eligibility for receiving hospice care— “Six months or less to live,” I was told. Others have judged the proximity of my physical death, as if Creator God has no say in the “work of his hands.” The obsession to conform to Medicare’s rules and regs, constantly under revision, keeps the sickened system contorted beyond fixing. The specter of this fiscal dragon continues sprouting new fire-spewing crowned-heads, terrifying its work force.
Qoheleth was more than accurate when he declared “a time to be born and a time to die.” No health care executive can make this decision for me. I belong to Another.
Heart Whisperings 