Sunday, April 21, 2013

Running on Nyquil

I have this recurring dream….

 I'm standing next to a lone tree on a grassy green hill.  Behind me, miles of open, undulating grass covered mounds fall away into nothingness.  Before me rolling and dark green pastures of heavy, ancient earth, damp with a settling blanket of white mist seem to surge toward a rocky escarpment of black, brown and gray.  The air is thick and wet with the memory of things known long before I was born, and my presence there feels like an “arrival.”  In this place I am alone, save only the wind and the cold to keep me company.  Behind me, familiar but forgotten music pushes between my shoulder blades and nudges me gently toward the sharply eroded, craggy formation that hides between where my vision ends and my imagination begins.  

Somehow, in my dream, I know that I am in Wales.  I know that I am dreaming, and I am aware of a powerful sense that I should know this place.   I am also aware that I don’t belong there.  The sounds I hear are an almost perfect balance between the harrowed reeds of ancient Celtic song and the wind.  I wear the cold and wet like an old woolen sea coat, but my feet are dry and my knees are strong.  My gaze is ever upon the old craggy hill in front of me.  I know in my head that the answers to everything lay buried there under the weathered stones and dangerous pyres, but I am satisfied to leave them buried.  It seems right, during my dream that I stay where I am.  The rocky, mist covered mountain seems more like a bank vault, safe and secure, guarded, and to be left alone….

I’ve had this little dream as long as I can remember.  I do not age in the dream, but I am older now than the “me” in the dream.  According to the little bit of research I’ve done on recurring dreams, they are mostly born of stress or a traumatic event.  I don’t feel that way when I have this dream. In fact, about twice a year I wake up feeling rested, refreshed and reconnected.    I can trace my family history back to Wales, according to my father, just a few generations ago.  My last name (Edwards) is anchored well in history and time, but I don’t really know much more.  At times of great stress in my life, I can hear a faint echo of the same music I hear in my dream.  How I wish I could capture it in my head long enough and loud enough to remember it.  I have tried many times in my studio to reproduce it, but every effort is rewarded only in quick failure.  It’s not as much a melody that I hear, but more of drone, like the rhythmic waves of the didgeridoo. 

It’s all rather connected, you see.  The rolling green hills, the ocean like movement of the quiet Celtic sound-scape, the wind at my back and the blackish mount before me…all so familiar yet, at the same time, so very far away, behind me and ahead of me at the same time.   Like the tree that stands beside me, I am rooted in earth, in water and in song.  It sings to me that I am a collection of many parts of every Edwards that has come before, from the Iron Age and Medieval Celts of long ago, to the Victorian Area Australians, to my father before me. 

Unlike my father, however, I am the last.  I'm not the last Edwards on the planet, but I am the last of this particular lineage.  As my 48th birthday approaches, I am more aware of the man inside than I have ever been.  While taking care of the “outside” me, I have somehow become more aware of the importance of focusing on “who” I have become as much as “what” I have become.   It’s strange, and perhaps even poetically correct, that the two main tools available to me in my quest to live a healthier and happier life have not really changed at all since my proto-brothers millennia ago first stood in the fog on those dark green, heather covered hills.  Diet and exercise, to this day are really still the best remedy for what we have made ourselves into. 

As I write this, I have lost my voice.  I don’t feel the best either, but that’s not the worst of it.  I'm not a happy sick person.  I can’t stand it.  I am by nature outrageously and asshole-ishly impatient (again those who know me will laugh and say that this is a massive understatement) and being sick enough to have to stop whatever I had planned, and rest, is not much different for me than sticking a railroad spike in my eyeball.  Everything I want to do or planned to do swirls around and sticks to the inside of my skull like a washing machine on spin cycle, and the sensation of doing nothing while I feel like crap is very nearly unbearable.  One of life’s little quandaries is the notion that, when busy, we wish for rest, and when resting, we seek to be busy.  Perhaps it’s my sense that it’s an unfair ‘waste of time to rest when sick’ that has me “nutted” up.  Earlier today I walked past my bicycle, which hangs on the wall in the TV room.  I felt a pang of guilt as I passed it by and actually said out loud, “sorry buddy.”  The notion of riding with a headache, sore throat and all is too much, and to be honest, my legs could probably use a day or two off.  Still I long to get out and ride, and hope for a quick passage through this seasons version of the flu. 

I know that one day I will visit Wales and stand upon the grounds of my ancestors.  I don’t know what I expect to feel, and perhaps will feel nothing other than the gratitude and contentment of travel.  I know full well that my dream is just a dream.  It’s more than likely an amalgam of this life’s memories and experiences, played out in the theater house of wishful thinking.  However, I’d like to think that the music which lives inside me, that I write and create, is rooted in my DNA and is really my one true inheritance, passed on down though the ages to my finger tips.  This life is my chance to imprint onto others that which I am good at…good at because like so very many of us, our gifts really do live inside us.  If there was ever a better definition of “sin,” it is to bottle up and intentionally stifle the legacy of talent we so naturally possess. 

I get the feeling that when I read back through this Nyquil fueled blog I may not recognize the author.  Still, I feel at least that I did something today.  It may only be that I did a few errands, went to Walmart for said Nyquil, drank a bunch out of sheer frustration and boredom, and then sat down at the computer to write.  If you see me on Monday, not only will I be feeling much better (thank you), but I will be 48!  Don’t forget to wish me a happy birthday!

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