Dreaming on down the road

My friends, rj and Migs, seem to be in an introspective mode, so, I suppose I can join them along the path. Seems I dreamt all night or perhaps only an instant - who's to say, it is the dream I recall when I awoke - about rolling a ball across the floor to a seated infant whose back was to the wall. The infant who could crawl and stand but not walk without support was faceless, or perhaps not faceless, not some horror movie blank faced no nose, no mouth, no eyes infant but rather just an infant whose features I did not recognize. It seems from this narrative that it, the baby, was a boy doesn't it. Anyway, I would roll a ball to the baby from some short distance across the floor, I was I believed seated on the floor, open legged, facing the baby. The baby was seated in a similar pose, opened legged, towards me and propped up by the wall behind him. The ball would roll into the area between his legs near his crotch and he would bat the ball away, generally making the ball go back in my direction. The very last scene in the dream the baby bats the ball in a direction that requires that I get up to retrieve the ball and then I lob the ball back to him in the air and the baby catches the ball on the first bounce, stands up and walks the ball back to me. Bingo! Eyes open! Awake! That's it. You go figure and comment here. Yes, I will answer questions about the dream content and anything else you might want to ask that is related to the dream. Waiting outside Charlotte until Wednesday morning when delivery is scheduled to occur. Waiting here since yesterday. Trying to expedite delivery to today but it's JIT and likely I'll just have to wait it out.

I Believe

I Believe
an essay by George Henderson

I believe in the power of love, in the healing and redemptive power of love. I believe that we should love everyone as we love ourselves. And, that in that simple statement, the encouragement to love our neighbor as our self lies a huge puzzle that we can profitably work on all of our lives. The puzzle is this, in loving someone else we learn to love ourselves and we must love ourselves in order to love someone else. The idea can be summed up but not elucidated in the phrase, "the unforgiving are most often the unforgiven" or its corollary, "the unloved are most often the most unloving". Forgiveness and love are so tied together as to be nearly the same thing, one does not exist without the other. "What is love?", you might ask. Well, you'll know it when you feel it, my friend otherwise I will have to refer you to Dr Maslow and his ideas of "unconditional positive regard". Unconditional positive regard is a great idea but expressing that idea is sometimes tricky. Often times we will do what we consider to be a loving act and the object of our action, our beloved, will either not notice our action or misinterpret our actions and then the fun begins.

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
1 John 4, down toward the end, as I recall.

Love yourself fully so that you might love another as well as you love yourself and let another love you fully so that you might learn to love yourself fully.

Got it? OK, do it!

Waiting for delivery in Hammond until Tuesday

Sherry,

Thanks for this wonderful story. Here is the complete article from the Washington Post with the photo essay

Something About Harry

Old Dogs are the Best Dogs

By Gene Weingarten

Sunday, October 5, 2008; Page W16

Not long before his death, Harry and I headed out for a walk that proved eventful. He was nearly 13, old for a big dog. Walks were no longer the slap-happy Iditarods of his youth, frenzies of purposeless pulling in which we would cast ~read more~

Without your forwarding of the chain letter I would not have found the original and the wonderful photo essay. In my unkinder moments in the past I would have done a "reply all" to send this little note to everyone in the chain with a preface excoriating them all for not having the gumption to attribute the work correctly and leaving out the photo essay. I will give the chain letter author credit for having included the Washington Post reference at the bottom of his text, complete I might add with the apocryphal caveat about being reproduced by permission. Chain letter writers, the writers of mass forwardings, the old send your friends a Xerox or a clipping of a magazine article approach to correspondence, have good intentions but it is a kind of laziness that galls me still to this day. But, I have grown older, wiser and more loving so I restrict my efforts to replying to you. The photo essay is a gem and should get wider distribution and to that end I might, emphasis might, post this in some fashion on my blog with the vain hope that it would get out to a wider audience.

I'm going to call you now and if I get you on the way to church, well, good, I'll talk to you and if I don't get you, well, I suppose I'll stop dawdling and go take a shower.

I love you more than words can express and time will allow, but I can write and I do have the rest of my life so I press on with the main task at hand, Loving Sherry, The Last Dance.

Later with love,

George