Zen Encounters with Loneliness by Terrance Keenan

Author:Terrance Keenan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

14

WILD APPLES, CROWS IN THE RAIN

But of course each of us does carry a burden. For some of us the burdens are so huge we simply collapse, or we create a script of bitterness that we recite regularly to anyone who will listen. We know it will be more readily validated than any joy we might have experienced. In my recovery I had created my own script:

“Writing is my life.

“I have to drink in order to write.

“I have to drink so much in order to write that I can’t write.

“Drink is killing me, literally.”

Before I went into rehab and for a long time after, I recited this script in several well-rehearsed versions to affirm my own misery, to explain away why I could no longer do what had been at the core of my life for thirty years, to listen to myself as though that made me real, made my inability to write real and somehow valid.

Then one night I had a dream. It was a prescient dream, I think. I do not normally give too much credence to dreams beyond their being a working out of some subconscious issues and the day’s events. I do not attach meaning to so-called symbols, nor do I see anything mystical in them. But this one stands before me stronger than my memory of today’s breakfast. I should add, perhaps, that this dream was an exaggerated version of earlier ones in which I found myself having to encounter a person with his or her back turned, ordinary seeming enough, whom I somehow knew to be death. Usually the person was dressed like a postman. If I saw the face I would die. I always woke up just as the person turned around.

In the usual inexplicable way of “facts” in dreams, the fact was that the street in front of our house was lined with hospital beds, much like parked cars. Each one had a napping child in it, watched over by a parent. I was out there with the others, my son in the bed. The canopy of trees arching over the street was greater in the dream than in reality, forming a green tunnel to the main street, a couple of houses away, but otherwise everything was as usual. All of the parents standing by the beds were staring toward the end of the tree tunnel. We were hearing terrible screams.

Then we saw a man run by as fast as humanly possible, screaming in total terror. Seconds later he was followed by a large (maybe eight-foot-tall), one-legged, demon-like creature with huge muscular arms and a large mouth. We could each see these things because the creature paused in his one-legged bounding and looked up our street. We stood frozen in place. He then turned and caught up to the fleeing man and we heard his screams as he was torn limb from limb alive and then devoured. The screams ended and we were still paralyzed in our places. We knew it would return.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.