In Ceremony to our Connections

What we put in the box becomes something different in our minds if left long enough and after decades of experience a single relooking, taking our perceptions out-of-the-box is all that is needed to shift the wheel of psycho-spiritual growth. Last night and this morning, I have done just that with the help of dream-maker in regards to my father.

After having a dream of hugging my father, not in his old-state-self, the one I grew up fearing whose mind still worked and yet turned against me, or so I thought, but the old, decrepit man, the one who has suffered a stroke and can’t make simple connections, find things, figure out how to button up his own shirt or untangle a wire. But, here he was in my dream, bent and white, as frail and brittle bird and he could see I was having problems, finding my keys, untangling some wires, stopping an over-heated spray bottle of key lube from spraying all over my hands and he was trying to be a help, but had no capacity to fix these particular problems.

“How are you, Dad?” I asked.

And, in such a strange way this dream was a gift in what it gave me upon waking and carrying the vision and feeling around with me all of the morning long. Dad can be forgiven he was doing the best he could, there in both my dreams and my past, in the vicinity of me attempting to help even if these attempts were futile. Now, soft and confused and at another time, angry and spitting at what he didn’t know how to fix, untangle, carry, bury, but, in both cases there and trying to help.

So, today, I remember to drink in the cups of love he did offer and his efforts to help me with math. Ironically, fractions and times tables after days at the steel mill, molten iron-ore, this times that equals something entirely different in exponential greatness, just as our trauma’s blossomed and blew up into nuclear family explosions, later cooled to sheets of steel, yet I will always be his daughter and we were standing beside one another.

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