So close to you we cannot fail

In the dream I am accompanying my daughter on a college tour. We are descending difficult to navigate metal stairs in some kind of towering outdoor stadium as high as a skyscraper, with each step almost as tall as we are. The whole apparatus shifts–more like scaffolding than a permanent structure–groaning and creaking, with our every move. The metal stairs are pebbled with tiny holes. A thin, wrought-iron railing to our right is all that stands between us and plunging to our death thousands of feet below. People keep pushing past us on the left, practically bolting down the swaying stairs. My daughter’s high heel catches in one of the holes on the step below and she stumbles. (I told her not to wear those ridiculously inappropriate shoes!) Her teammates on her soccer team call her Bambi for her tendency to trip on those long, lean legs of hers; Bambi, after the classic Disney film in which a little fawn loses its mother—I suppose that would be me–to a hunter.

The heel is stuck. The apparatus pitches and I can’t reach her to help.  Somehow, my daughter extricates her shoe and continues down the stairs while I remain paralyzed with fear, simultaneously aghast at my inability to sacrifice myself to protect her. Suddenly the scene shifts as scenes in dreams inexplicably do. I am still on the same stair, but the other people have disappeared and so have the stairs below me, replaced by a kind of hammock of fragile webbed netting like the bags lemons come in at the supermarket. I cannot see what supports the netting on the other side. I know I am expected to crawl across it but I am so not Survivor material; there is just no way in hell I am going to risk it. Instead I turn and go back up the suddenly carpeted and indoor stairs. And I wake up; desperate to find the daughter I have once again somehow failed.

Things have been a little tense around here lately. My husband and daughter have not been seeing eye-to-eye. My days have been seemingly punctuated by their outraged outbursts. He feels she does not appreciate all he does for her. In his mind she is not stepping up to the many looming college, financial aid, and scholarship application tasks confronting us this summer, not adequately preparing for her ACTs and SATs, not taking the steps necessary to complete her required IB and college application essays. She feels victimized, persecuted, and misunderstood. Both of them are very talented at sharing their feelings with me.

When not listening to their complaints, I, on the other hand, have been further amusing our right mind by secretly trying to resurrect a recurring little fantasy in which my daughter and I–this last, nostalgic summer before her senior year in high school–get to do all those mother-daughter things we’ve been largely putting off since her adolescence hit so freaking hard. We will drive to Boulder, take a little morning hike around the Flatirons, indulge in a fabulous exotic lunch, and spend the afternoon window shopping on the mall, trying on nutty hats and glasses the way we used to and watching street performers fold themselves up and stuff themselves into little plastic cubes. We will get our nails done, see all those indie movies we never had time to, hit the public pool and read the same novels we will later discuss over the chocolate chip cookies and banana bread we will bake. I know.

Yesterday, the last day of a long weekend dedicated to honoring those who had sacrificed dearly to protect our American way of life, launching a summer of sentimental cravings for what A Course in Miracles calls our “special relationships” to comply with our fantasies; it all came to a head. My husband had had it with her. My daughter had had it with him. They both had had it with my disinclination to try to jump in and fix it for them as I once had only to be turned on by both of them like rabid dogs.

There were slamming doors, raised voices, tears. My daughter stormed out the front door. My husband stormed out the side. Our little dog ran around in frantic circles, licking my ankles. I sat in my office, the innocent bystander, reaching for the muscle of indignation only to find it disabled. What did these theatrics really have to do with me, I wondered? I could feel my husband’s fear that our daughter would somehow not make it to adulthood, somehow fail to take her place as a responsible, independent citizen in a world filled with irresponsible citizens; masking the real fear: that he had failed her. I could feel my daughter’s fear that whatever she did would never be enough to live up to her parents’ expectations. That she might not make it in this world; might not become the independent, responsible citizen we expected; masking the real fear: that she had failed him. And all at once I could claim the fear playing out in the characters in my dream—the sleeping and the waking one—as my own.

A deeply comforting line I had read in the introduction to Part II of the workbook came back to me then like a phrase of welcome music:

“I am so close to you we cannot fail.”

We have not failed each other, have not failed our creator; have not failed our one and only self. A self that remains seamlessly bound to its source. The notion that we have somehow failed our perpetual wholeness by selfishly declaring our independence is a bunch of hooey despite the ego thought system’s elaborate reenactments of individuals vying for control in a hallucinated world of dueling interests.

“We had a wish that God would fail to have the Son whom He created for Himself. We wanted God to change Himself, and be what we would make of Him. And we believed that our insane desires were the truth. Now we are glad that this is all undone and we no longer think illusions true. The memory of God is shimmering across the wide horizons of our minds. A moment more, and it will rise again.”

We cannot fail to return to God, that symbol of shared eternal peace and wholeness, because, as the Course tells us again and again, ideas leave not their source. Despite our impossible desire to experience ourselves as “other,” we remain one, resting in eternal, united love, dreaming our trippy dreams of exile. Despite the repressed guilt we carry over the belief that we have pulled off the impossible and must create a world of other bodies on which to pin the crime, the idea of guilt has never left its source in the mind. Our attempts to get rid of it by projecting it on someone “out there” will always fail us. But the moment in which we recognize a dream figure’s call for love as the same miserable call of the dream figure we identify with the dream vanishes, the credits roll, and we find ourselves transported with a gentle, compassionate smile to our right mind. A mind that sees only common interests and knows without question that our true unified nature has never and could never fail us.

When my daughter came home the ego attack had passed. We sat down together and reviewed the many daunting tasks she needed to complete. She admitted she had been feeling a little overwhelmed; I couldn’t blame her. I helped her break the tasks into doable pieces and set up a calendar. My husband drifted in from the backyard and we calmly reviewed the information we needed to collect to fill out the financial aid and scholarship applications.  With a relieved sigh, the dog curled up and took a well deserved nap at our feet.

Advertisement

~ by sudugan on June 7, 2010.