The picture disappeared from the television screen and I,
lying closely opposite that wall and snuggled under a snow-white duvet, reached
to the right for the remote. The fawn
colored pug stretched on my right and my arm reached beyond her again for the
remote.
I spoke to the bird: “You are not supposed to be out of your
cage. Go back.” He smiled and kept heading for the television
screen. I had a picture of the show for
a minute, and then it disappeared again.
My right arm was trying to keep the baby from falling off the side of
the bed next to me. I looked to the wall
next to my left shoulder and knew that beyond the sliding glass door set in
this soft, all-white condominium my beloved ocean waited.
There was an awareness that my responsibility to hold the
baby, or was it the pug, on the side of the bed despite its propensity to crawl
forward and to the side, was tied to an obligation to someone. And that someone was not in the condo.
The phone rang. My
brain came up from a consciousness that I did not really want to leave just
yet. The two cocker spaniels on my blue
and gold duvet popped up from a supine position, ready to start the day. I made it to the phone in my nightgown and
sock-clad feet just as she was speaking to the answering machine. I intercepted her, mid-message. It was a woman I spoke to yesterday about a
doctor’s appointment for her. She saw my
“missed call” number on her home phone and dialed back. She thought I was the post office and
apologized to me. I hung up, and was
sorry it was not someone else who actually wanted to talk to me because
my dream had been just a fanciful journey of a brain that did not want to wake
up to the stark reality of a rainy day of Social Distancing.
And that person in the dream who was not there, but
there. Who was he? He was someone that I
The sun conure calls to me from the Bird Room in the house where I really
do live and he just wants to see my face…. Well, yes, and get a
Pepperidge farm goldfish cracker from me.
He is gloriously orange and gold and emerald and a few shades of burnt siena. He is not like the mischievous parrot in the
dream. Nor am I Mrs. Anyone in real
life, much less Mrs. Russell Peters.
The parrot gave me an important lesson in the dream: attitude can free you from the cage, even if
you can’t go far. I know people who are
rebels-to-the-core and can barely stand speed limit signs. This requested, soft-quarantine I will call
it, is killing them because they have not learned how to work with (instead of
against) legitimate authority. They are
the ones who will argue a justifiable traffic ticket or push the limits of any
rules and regulations and then wail like spoiled children when held to the same
standard as the rest of the community. This
spot that we are ALL in is tougher for them because they are like un-broken
horses: it isn’t going to get fixed or
liked in a day.
I am thinking of the other extreme. There used to be a convent of cloistered nuns
on Court Street in Syracuse. There they
lived, I believe five of them, locked-down for life by choice for the
rest of the world. How for the rest of
us? It’s because they gave up the lives
we live of zooming around to soccer practice, proms, restaurants, conferences, and
the like, in order to pray for us.
They accepted being confined so that
we could somehow find true freedom.
Apparently, their prayers were not enough. We didn’t even realize it but all our
activities of “living” were actually spinning us and wrapping us into a spider’s
web of “busy-ness.” We liked it
initially, but it kept wrapping us tighter.
It was getting hard for us to breathe.
We (America, particularly) would live at hell’s speed for 358 days and
expect a 7-day vacation to fix us. By
all accounts of mathematics, logic, and physics, that couldn’t have worked for
us. God even built in a Day-7 rest for us
every week and we refused to take it. We
continued our running, and acquiring, and doing, so relentlessly we could not
have found the “stop” button unless we got fired or divorced or had a
break-down. Even then, we’d be too tired
to sort out how to fix what we had become.
Decades ago, Father John in Pastoral Guidance class told us
that sometimes break-downs were really break-throughs. The thought of that made me kind of queasy in
my stomach. But now I’m wondering if it
is true. When some experience is so
harsh that it actually “breaks” a part of the way we think and feel, perhaps
some good can come from that. Instead of
letting the sad part of us tell our soul:
“This is the end of you,” maybe we can find the little piece of life in
us that will croak out: “This is a new
beginning for you.” I saw a commercial
the other day where a woman went to break an egg to cook, and a little bird (digitized,
for sure, because he wasn’t even damp-looking) peeped back at her when she
separated the shell, and flew away. Life
is full of surprises that can turn out better than we hoped.
I live next door to a horse farm and have, more than once in
the past eight years, lamented that I don’t visit the horses often enough. It took me ten years of house-hunting to find
this perfect house in a perfect neighborhood with beautiful horses. But I was so busy going, doing, seeing,
teaching, working, etc., that I rarely stopped to visit them. I’ve got adult goats next door and I missed
their entire “childhood” except for watching them through my back window occasionally. I am told that little goats can be
funny. Well, with this round, I won’t
know that. Maybe next time there are
baby goats I can visit and be present to the gentler side of life that has been
here all along waiting for me to fully enjoy it.
Tonight, when I dream, I won’t need the parrot to visit me
again. I’ve lived today outside of the
cage. I will enjoy what is mine to enjoy
for however long – and someday, I will go back to work. But I will be a different person. I just know it.
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| "Free bird" |
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