Thursday, July 8

Beginning of a book?

Have you ever had dreams while your eyes are open and your mind is awake? Dreams as you stand outside in the frozen expanse of the world, covered in the white pristine blanket of snow that doesn't fit with the reality of the moment or the atmosphere that you breathe? Dreams so vivid and actual, not flights of fancy like those of dragons and epic tales of knights going to battle in the Medieval times but real dreams…dreams with enough present day reality that they take the breath from your lungs and pierce your heart with sorrow because of what is not wars with what is? Dreams that are of what could have been, what should have been and what could be……

Maybe it's me….crazily locked in the realm between fantasy and reality. Maybe the disease of the mind, often called insanity, has pierced through the thin veil of normalcy and sheer lunacy that make me more separate from the race to which I was born than that of animals. These moments are there for a minute, and then…like wisps of smoke, they are gone and the harsh clank of the gate that holds such illusional worlds at bay from the normal people sounds in the recesses of my mind even as the heart records a sorrowful memory of what was once seemingly so real that is now once again lost.

Maybe it's a touch of God; daring my fragile and broken mind to desire those things to which He has purposed and equipped me for. Maybe it's nothing more than the brokenness inside of me, isolated and buried so far into my psyche that there are moments, for the sake of pressure release, that it claws and inches its way to the surface to vent the foul air of impossibilities so that I don't rot from the inside out.

I try and grasp such moments and hold on….to live in those worlds the dreams bring and like a druggie taking a much desired hit of their drug of choice, I shake with the effort….promises to myself whispering on the thin air, rapidly spoken in an effort to bring the dreams to reality and maybe cease to exist for a while in the plane of reality and frolic in the world of make-believe hope. A world where there is a balance between loving and being loved, fulfillment and longing, chaos and peace. A world where I am what I thought I should be rather than this broken, simple mess that calls itself human. A man who walks with his head held upright, humble in his pride and gentle in his strength. The kind of man that people look to and say, "Him. I want to be like or to be part of that story of him."

The reality is that such a man, if the capability that creates such a creature actually exists within the biological, spiritual and ethical makeup of this body, was killed a long time ago in the infancy of his beginnings. Such a man was brutally and methodically tortured to the point where such 'flights of fantasy' that would make him believe that he could actually be were wiped out, buried under layers and layers of scar tissue that they could never be realistically resurrected again. Long after the torturers of this 'could-be' man were gone from the grimy and filthy landscape of this world, the man still walks the walk of the dead…..a body so wounded, so callously whipped and beaten that simply doesn't realize that it has earned the right to stop walking and keel over in the embrace of the death given so long ago.

After those moments come and go my mind quests inside itself for the memories of its creation but find nothing but the reflective darkness surrounding the sitting figure of its existence. It cannot envision what it sits upon, where or when. It looks around and sees nothing….as if the dreams have taken with them the very capability of dreaming other things as well when it faded into the black inkiness of wherever. It simply sits and sighs….an empty sigh filled with nothing but the existence of its expelling. The medical term of this condition that exists in the man I am has been labeled in the world to which I am assured is reality, depression. Acute depression that is 'treatable' through even keeled chemicals balancing emotional and physical deficiencies so that I have less dreams and more reality. Maybe that is why I do not take them…..for even if the dreams are nothing, the break from the reality of sorrow and brokenness is well worth the painful return to reality's embrace.

Maybe that is because I die when I am not dreaming, for this dream state is the world I was meant to live in thrive in and grow in, to make real in the brokenness of the world that cannot sustain its impossible enticements. That image that I see of myself in the sharp clarity of the dreams is a confident, firm, and strong man who walks with his head upright scanning the horizons for the next purpose, the next moment of living life to its fullest. A beloved son with the authority of His Father, the Most High King….maybe, in those moments of dreaming, I am simply surrendered totally to the powerful movement and mercy of that Heavenly Being known as the Great I AM, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph….who's Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, came to earth 2,000 years ago and died upon a cross of wood and sin for me. Maybe in those moments of disconnection from the broken reality of this man in this world I find the man that God has created, shaped, molded and purposed from the dawn of my birth for 'things greater than these.' This would explain why, when the moments are gone and the dreams fade from the fevered grasping hands of my frantic self, that darkness descends and I can see nothing for a period……one does not stand in the brightest of light and then have 'night-vision' when plunged back into the darkness….

I don't know why I feel so disorientated after these 'dreams', as if I have been suddenly yanked into a world that isn't real from the one that is of my true self. Maybe its because I know, in the depths of my soul, that I wasn't meant to live in this real world of brokenness and sorrow, pain and isolation, but rather in the world of connection and freedom. And it's recurring memory in the dreams that haunt my closed eyes and beckon to my sorrowed heart is the impus of creation of this connected and free world hollowed out in this world for the benefit of the dreamer and those who realize its alienation and desire in contrast to what 'is'.

I cannot say that this world or the other are true except in my heart's cry at the vanquishing of the one for the jarring impact of the other. That other world is true, not based on fact and scientific data splayed out in the computer printouts of the experiment. Rather, based on the freedom that is lost in the descending darkness afterwards…..the loss of completeness and peace for the reality of sorrow's grasp. As one of the earliest of bards named Tatian once declared…."Retiring by myself, I sought how I might be able to discover the truth. And, while I was giving my most earnest attention to the matter, I happened to meet with certain barbaric writings, too old to be compared with the opinions of the Greeks – yet too divine to be compared with their errors. And I was led to put faith in them by the unpretentious nature of the language, the candid character of the writers, the foreknowledge displayed of future events, the excellent quality of the teachings, and the declaration that the government of the universe is centered in One Being."

Your guess is as good as mine, my dear reader. Possibly nothing more than stirrings of a heart that refuses to beat its last beat, despite the fact the body has long ago given up its sinew and is nothing more than mere bones ……possibly glimpses of alternate 'possibilities' that require only a reset button to be pushed in the brain so that the mind is flushed and a blank slate is created to rewrite the historicity of my life? Or the deliberate, intentional and pressure training of a God who knows that which lies in the blank darkness of the future and only has the fatherly desire to prepare His beloved son for its endurance and overcoming?

I am simply a bard…though not one of poetic expanse or grandiose voice, rather simply a tale-telling chronicler of epic adventures untold by those heroes who travel them, dark and demonic battles between the dark enemy and the warriors of light that rage around the 'innocents' (or rather the ignorant) and the unseen movement of God in the lives of His children that is too often these days forgotten and unobserved by even those whose life He has touched.

I am simply a pilgrim in a land that is not his home…..