Spinning Yarns

About a week ago, I had a dream. I dream all the time, and usually I write them down, if I happen to wake up remembering them, but this one went by largely unnoticed, at the time. This is from memory.

In this dream, some friends and I were setting up a large, canvas tent outdoors, under some pine trees. We had gotten the tent most of the way up, but we were frustrated because every time we got it fully standing, one of the corners would collapse, as if the pole had fallen away inside. We’d lift and brace the fallen corner, only to have another corner fall in.

The logic of dreams is not the logic of the waking world, and it took us a long time before we finally opened up the tent and looked inside, to see what the problem was. As it turned out, there were no poles. Not a one. We’d been hanging the tent over thin air, and we hadn’t gotten it quite right, so one corner or the other kept falling down. Nevertheless, there it was, a flapping pool of canvas draped over the pure idea of a tent, and thus it had form.

This dream came and went, and I would likely have never given it another thought, except that tonight during aikido practise, Sensei was talking about how the motion of aikido has form, while being formless — possessing structure without being that structure. This lesson would have been purely philosophical to me, most nights. Instead, my mind grew bright with the sudden memory of that dream, and a moment of profoundly satisfying clarity settled over me in that instant.

Such moments of pure insight can make a year of tribulation and confusion worthwhile. In such an interval, however brief, the petty cyphers of daily life burn away, leaving only the essence of understanding. A droplet, no more — but a droplet more precious than gold, or even water. That is reward enough for today.

Filed by Michael at 12:56 under Dream, Personal, Philosophical
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