The Waking by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Will You Go?

I had a dream the other night and for the first time in my life I woke up and realised that this was not a dream, it was a vision. It seemed to come from beyond the mess of my subconscious, its content was so much bigger than me like something bigger than me was speaking through me.
I don't know where to begin with describing it, it was a synthesis of so many big things that made sense and yet when I woke up I knew exactly what was being said to me. It was a question being asked of me, a big question set so perfectly in the context of all that I have been preoccupied lately.
I'm not going to go into all the details, I'll just try to put the most important points. I wonder is it right of me to communicate a vision here, but maybe putting it into words will lead me into it again...
Before this part of the dream, I was dreaming normal dreams, there was something about the novel "War and Peace" and being stuck around two difficult men staying in my home who hated and were cruel to me and yet I was being forced (perhaps by my family or mum, I can't recall) to put up with them and suppress increasing violent rage...none of it really stuck out, it was one of those dreams that you knew was processing some emotion or other, I don't know and I don't know where the novel came in anyway...
It was a new sequence, the start of which is really really vague for me and makes no logical sense but yes has a kinaesthetic feeling of rightness. I was at the cinema watching one of the "Three Colours" movies, but there seemed to be some confusion about which one it was. The movie was over, but there seemed to be a bit at the end which I was compelled to stay on for. (Actually that is the case with that particular trilogy, a sequence at the end which ties together all three movies)
I was watching it, but suddenly I was in it...I was one of the extras and though the main female role was being played by Julie Delpy (the heroine of Three Colours White which is my favourite of the three) by the end of it, it was me.
I went through a post office to a garden where a man was waiting for something. (There had been something about a train station too which I couldn't recall.) He had been waiting there for some time and a crowd had joined him. I wasn't sure if the thing he was waiting for had already arrived and recurred on a regular basis or if it hadn't arrived yet.
It was night and we were waiting for the coming of something, we didn't know what it was and he didn't say what it was. He was an older man, like an older version of Jean-Marc Barr out of "The Big Blue", a man I think is really beautiful looking. He just played with children but he was waiting for the heroine too. She didn't know why she was there. It was an uneasy wait, people were jostling, someone fell into a pond and she fished them out. We were looking up into the sky. There was a sense of "What are we waiting for? Why are we here? Will it even come?"
The sky was grey with wispy clouds, the garden was dark. "Ah" I thought, wanting to make sense, wanting to know what I was expecting before it even came. "We are waiting for the dawn. Perhaps we are all waiting for the dawn to come so that we can see the new day together and realise how beautiful it is so we can all live new lives." This comforted me.
And then the dawn came and I was the heroine. Yes the dawn was beautiful, the sky illuminated with colour beyond anything that you can ordinarily conceive. Here I began to realise that this was coming from somewhere so far beyond me that it was so much BIGGER than what I had been expecting. And it was a terrible frightening beauty because suddenly the earth began to shake, things fell from the sky and the world as we knew it began to be destroyed.
The man drew me to him, he alone had known that this would happen, and that there was hope in this, it needed to be. As I drew close I lost my fear. "I have loved you forever and ever" he said to me (or something to that effect but MORE, the feeling was more than the words) "I have been waiting for you. Will you go?"
"Will you go?" I woke up with this question blazed at the forefront of my mind and a distinct certainty that "This is no mere dream."

A small postscript which could be my fancy and means nothing but strikes me as amusing and hindsightful...two days later I met an man who looked like an older Jean-Marc Barr!

Song: If You Seek … by Thomas Merton

If you seek a heavenly light
I, Solitude, am your professor!

I go before you into emptiness,
Raise strange suns for your new mornings,
Opening the windows
Of your innermost apartment.

When I, loneliness, give my special signal
Follow my silence, follow where I beckon!
Fear not, little beast, little spirit
(Thou word and animal)
I, Solitude, am angel
And have prayed in your name.

Look at the empty, wealthy night
The pilgrim moon!
I am the appointed hour,
The “now” that cuts
Time like a blade.

I am the unexpected flash
Beyond “yes,” beyond “no,”
The forerunner of the Word of God.

Follow my ways and I will lead you
To golden-haired suns,
Logos and music, blameless joys,
Innocent of questions
And beyond answers:
For I, Solitude, am thine own self:
I, Nothingness, am thy All.
I, Silence, am thy Amen!