THE LIFE OF THE MIND

Dreams, fantasies, memories, reflections, meditations... As the body ages, the life of the mind occupies more and more of the reality of my life. 

Last night I dreamt I had become the target of criminal assassins. I lived alone--as I do not--in an apartment--as I do not--on the seventh and highest floor of a low-rise building, in some part of the world that is unknown to me. With the urgency of the hunted, I needed to return to my apartment to recover what was important to take with me on my escape. The elevator... ? No. Too dangerous and too confined a space. I devised an ingenious way to scale the building by running around the perimeter of every floor, each one tilting a little higher to take me to the next. But this design turned out to be a deceptive, M.C.Escher-ish illusion, leaving me trapped in constant motion on the same floor.

Instead, I took to the wooden stairway at the side of the building, like an internal fire escape, running up so many flights I was exhausted by the time I reached the top. Inside, my apartment was fully furnished. Everything was there. What should I take? Clothes? The closet was crammed with them. I realized I could only take what I was wearing, and changed into a pair of light gray pants, a nondescript shirt, so as not to draw attention. 

Next, the safe. A small fireproof box. I recalled having left a roll of money there, in case of an emergency. Thousands of dollars, mostly in hundred dollar bills, all rolled up neatly. But then, reaching for it, I recalled also having decided at some earlier time that it was too much, too susceptible to theft, and had taken much of it to hide elsewhere, leaving only a deceptive roll consisting mostly of dollar bills, as a kind of decoy. I had left myself a note, a hint, to help me remember where I had hidden the rest...

I wanted to tell my daughter--not my daughter; where did she come from? where did she go?--where to find that note, but didn't know what to tell her. I simply gave her the remaining cash and ran out, down the stairs again.

On the next floor down I found a room where a professor--a glib man of deceptively pleasant mien--was preparing for a seminar with a handful of students. I immediately suspected him of being the assassin, but he read my mind and gave me a not unkind smile. It's not the obvious suspects you should be concerned about, he told me. The one should worry about is the one you least suspect...

The dream continued, but faded, from that point, from my memory. 

I suspect the dream's narrative had to do with the literal and inexorable approach of death, as the years pass; and with the understanding that I will not escape, and that any money that I have and all my worldly goods will be left behind. It's a reminder that when I leave this world, it will be with nothing I have accumulated along the way.

As I say, the life of the mind increasingly takes over from the real world as the place in which I am now given to live...

A NEW LOOK...

Well, somewhat new.  I hope the links at the top are a little more visible and inviting now.  The "Buddhist Connections" now lead to a number of the Buddhist blogs that were in the blogroll before, and the blogroll itself is much abbreviated for this reason--and also because we have cleared out a few blogs that were defunct.  The order of things in the right-hand sidebar has been changed, in the interests, I hope, of clarity and priority.  If you find any glitches or inconsistencies, I'd love to hear from you.

This goes along with a major effort to clean out my office space, which had become so cluttered I'd begun to avoid going in there--choosing, instead, to take a laptop to some other part of the house!  Too many old files, to much old computer stuff that I'd not thrown out for fear of losing something important, too many books, too many unused office supplies, much too much of everything.  With Maggie's help, I have slowly been creating space and hope, by the new year, to have an office with room for breath and new invention.  There's still a ways to go, but we're getting there.

It seems that Ellie, in her office upstairs, is moved by the same uncluttering spirit.  It's a small house.  We moved here from a much larger one and, this past year, gave up the commercial storage space we had been renting.  It's the garage, now, that has become the repository of decades of family papers, photographs, books, memorabilia, all stashed in boxes I doubt will ever be opened.  What's to be done with all this stuff?

There's a good lesson here, I know--a familiar one to all those who can't bear to get rid of the things that we accumulate alone the way.   All this stuff is a reflection of, and on, the clutter in the mind.  If I were a better Buddhist, I would have chucked it all long ago!