Broken but Happy

I woke up at 2:30 from dreams it seems I've dreamed a thousand times. Feeding people I love - including Dan, who I haven't seen in over twenty years - vegetarian sushi. Can you really make it with roasted red pepper? Please promise me that we'll talk before we die I pleaded even as I knew there wasn't anything left to say. We can't be with our favorite teachers all the time. Some we see only briefly and, learning what was there to learn, move on.

Waking, I warmed coffee from the day before yesterday and carried it outside to drink. The dog rambled, owls hooted back and forth and I stood alone in the cold staring dizzily up at the resonant tendrils of the Milky Way. Very clear night, many shooting stars. Yet something seemed to stand between me and the sky, hindering true vision. I recall as a child gazing upward, hardly able to breathe with all the beauty and majesty but now the heavens are just another idea. Or so it seems. I hunkered by the ashes of yesterday's deadfall, felt the heat still rising. A rooster crowed and I thought as I always do, shut up you damn fool. The foxes are still out.

And later still came inside to pray and write, still feeling that veil - that wall, whatever we choose to call it - and wanted to plunge straight through it. We make our own obstacles and so can undo them at will but . . . well, who amongst us ever gets around to it? We slip into these habits and have a hard time seeing it's the habits that keep us broken. Well, broken but happy. Whatever else one feels in these before-dawn hours - making little poems, saying little prayers, accompanied only by a dog - one does indeed feel joy, one is indeed lifted.