Posted - 01/17/2012 12:27pm
14 Comments | Add Comment SWEET HONEY FROM FADED DREAMS
January, 2012
Sonoma, California
Last night I dreamed -- blessed illusion --
that I had a beehive here
in my heart
and that
the golden bees were making
white combs and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Antonio Machado, Poet
(translated by Robert Bly)
The place where destiny intersects faded dreams, at the corner of faith, hope and love is where I cease the locomotion juxtaposed with my shallow breathing to become "a hole in a flute that the Christ's breath moves through," as intoned by 14th-century Persian poet, Hafiz. If I still smoked I'd surely reach for a cigarette right then and there to hush my senses. After the yearslong amble from fallen expectations to rising dreams, I finally made it to the finish line where all paths converge at the crossroads of origin, desirous of starting over again. Blessed illusion.
Thank God for life's endless supply of chances -- *consider the lilies, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin -- offered up like Antonio Machado's golden bees primed to create a beehive for "making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures." I'm in my Sunday best now talking to Him praying for the next train to somewhere else, all the while asking His help in burying old failures. I want that second chance. I can see clearly now....
Let go, let God. Isn't that what we say when we lose our way, or the way isn't the way we thought it would turn out when we started the journey? Years ago I heard someone say "there are no atheists in foxholes." Amen, brother.
Who likes to talk about failures? Exposing one's ghosts doesn't make for elevating conversation, dear. And yet, the storyline imagined umpteen Harvest moons ago fashioned to anticipate a stellar outcome, is, an artifact worthy of exploration. Revisiting the storyline to harvest from it rich learning is like discovering the jewel in the crown in a life's journey. You can't make sweet honey from faded dreams, otherwise.
The alternative is to keep carrying images of missed fortunes and relationship misadventures, like heavy satchels packed with gold that we can't let go. When we don't revisit old failures and faded dreams that we keep hidden and stashed away in the closet of our intimate space, the crossroads of origin appear like a mirage in the desert, instead of a destination within reach.
Again I turn to my muse and the words of Celtic poet, John O'Donahue who knew, quite brilliantly, how to pierce through the heart of darkness:
We are uncomfortable in looking back on our old failures.
Yet failure is often the place where suffering has left the most precious gifts....
Failure is the place where destiny swings against our intentions.
What you wanted and worked for never came.
Your energy and effort were not enough.
Failure also happens in the inner world, the times when your
own smallness and limitation ruined things;
you reached deep into yourself for something kind or creative and
caught only smallness....
Failure is then often the place where you suffered unintentionally.
Reflection on our failures brings home to us the hidden secrets of our nature.
Failure is the place where longing is unexpectedly thwarted.
This often brings interesting discovery and reintegration.
Listen, do you want to know a secret? It is this: when you make sweet honey from faded dreams you get to lighten your load. How else to reconcile the "one that got away," or fame that never rose to the occasion, let alone the Camelot one didn't live in, replete with a moat to have saved one from the long day's journey into the night? As for me I was busy building castles in the air, don't you know?
....Every time it rains it rains
Pennies from heaven.
Don't you know each cloud contains
Pennies from heaven.
You'll find your fortune falling
All over town.
Be sure that your umbrella is upside down.
Trade them for a package of sunshine and flowers.
If you want the things you love
You must have showers.
So when you hear it thunder
Don't run under a tree.
There'll be pennies from heaven for you and me.
music: Arthur Johnston
lyrics: Johnny Burke
Oh, if I had only known, would I have chosen to venture out quite the distance I did? Venturing out leads to the puzzlement that is the labyrinthian maze, only to find one ending up in the what went wrong department of the shopping mall we inhabit, as we dart in and out of a bewildering array of choices of all that glitters, that isn't really gold.
Have you noticed how often in real life instead of reel life, we end up deciding it was the other one who was to blame? We come out on the side of chalking it up to bad luck, or calling it irreconcilable differences, when we don't offer up a penetrating gaze in the mirror to view ourselves as who we really are. The buck stops here, right here, right now, with me. With you. Collect yourself, man.
Do we ever stop to reconstruct the home we live in, the one that houses our spirit and soul, to clear the rubble for becoming "a hole in the flute that the Christ's breath moves through?" We deconstruct and reconstruct our physical spaces to feel new again, yet when it comes to our individual life journeys we get to deconstruction, only to leave the rubble behind. Let someone else pick it up and make something of it. It wasn't my fault. I am not to blame. Your fault. Your catch.
What if I assembled all the fault lines along my long day's journey into the night and lined them up like dominoes to deconstruct the pattern of my locomotion through life? I bet I'd learn a thing or two about the "hidden secrets" of my nature, if I reflected on my failures. I think I'd know the foundation I'd need to reconstruct the new way once I cleared the old away. Now that, is surely making sweet honey from faded dreams.
Now here's a little something about Dominoes that I bet you didn't know from the history of Dominoes:
"Dominoes...are simple building blocks that can be assembled in innumerable ways to create a large variety of games, ranging from the simple to the complex, from games in which the gameplay is almost mechanical, to games that require great skill and strategy."
Haven't I been playing Dominoes all my life? Haven't you? We know this game, you and I.
Last night I dreamed that I awoke refreshed at the crossroads of origin and that instead of a mirage in the desert, I had finally turned the corner to find a never before considered outlook to make an amazing discovery. Everything old seemed new again. The landscape was the same but I was seeing it with new eyes. At this outlook I didn't forget the yearslong amble from fallen expectations. I remembered each failure, each attempt to catch a falling star to make it mine, each hope pinned to my heart's desires and knew I stood taller for having fallen, yet risen again.
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from....
....We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot
Deposit 25 cents in the Jukebox adjust the volume
and hear:
Billie Holiday -- Pennies From Heaven (1936)
Click below:
*Luke 12, King James Bible
