The answer comes in the night

Let’s skip the small talk. When I meet someone new, I’m less interested in finding out what they do for a living than I am in discovering what they think the purpose of being alive is. Once, driving with a new friend I asked what she thought the meaning of life is. She took her eyes off the road to turn toward me: “Are you really asking me that?”

I was.

My impatient desire to get to the bottom of things is one reason I’m a student of dreams. I figure that when our brain chemistry shifts so that with eyes closed in the dark we can see more clearly than by day, it’s probably the right time to get answers to otherwise unanswerable questions. We might not know exactly what dreams are or where they come from, but for sure they are taking us far beyond our ordinary ways of knowing. Case in point: last year, at about this time my dreams gave me the answer to my most stubborn question.

I dreamed I was in my childhood home in the doorway of the sunroom where my mother kept potted plants on wicker stools and bamboo shelves. Even in the dream I knew my mother had died, and I was overwhelmed by grief. I sank to the floor in tears, as a tendril from one of the plants fell on my hair and neck. It was as if that plant had extended a hand to stroke my skin and comfort me. Then a voice began to speak, just as a starburst beamed from my heart’s center:

“The meaning of life,” the voice explained, “is to bring some light to this troubled world, and when we leave, we leave it here.”

It’s the kind of thing I might have read on a small square of paper stapled to the string of an herbal teabag. If I’d read it in a self-help book, or on a greeting card, I might have rolled my eyes. It’s a hymnal favorite and a New Age cliché.

Into the light

But it wasn’t a cliché when I held my daughter in the first moments of her life and saw a light glowing from within her newly breathing body. Nor was it a cliché when I sensed  a feathery glowing light surrounding my mother’s body as she lay dying.

I imagine this light bracketing life and death is what the dream voice was referencing. But I still wonder how to call it forth on an ordinary day. I suspect that it’s the light of joy and love. It’s what radiates when we smile, and the moment when eyes meet in recognition. In the dream, the the light beamed from my chest after I cried tears of sadness, and after I was touched by a plant my mother had tended to. So perhaps this is a reminder that experiencing pure emotions and releasing them helps reveal the light, too. Then we leave it behind in the things we attend to: the seeds of kindness and compassion that we nurture and nourish as gardeners, teachers, friends, lovers, parents, helpers and healers.

So, I have my answer. After all my questioning and searching, it’s that simple. And it’s as tricky to hold onto day-to-day as is a dream that slips past our memory almost as soon as we wake up.

© 2019 Tzivia Gover

ZzzZZzzZZZZZzz

This post is dedicated to my mentor and partner-in-dreams, Justina Lasley, who is an author and the founder of the Institute for Dream Studies.