well I guess

In the middle of the night I heard an owl. Must have been in the neighbor's yard. There wasn't another sound in the night but its deep and resonant hooting. Hoo, hoo-oo, hoooo, hoooo, hoo. I memorized the pattern before falling asleep again. I haven't figured out what it is yet.

I joke that I never get anything done because of moments like these. I might spend hours listening to owl calls trying to figure this out. In any case, I didn't hear it calling my name so I suppose that's a good thing.

Before I woke I had an intense and vivid dream. (In fact, all my dreams of late have been intense and vivid, mostly involving breakthrough interactions with my mother or a boss, strangely.) In the dream my sister-in-law Lisa was alive. Again. She had indeed died "last year" (it was actually 2 years ago) but here she was, attending her own funeral party. In the dream she'd died from some accident, even though she had been suffering with cancer. The feeling in the dream is that we were living that day again, and only she and I knew it. We knew it could go either way. Throughout the dream we kept telling each other, excitedly, "We don't know what will happen today!" We wanted to be somewhat careful, but we also wanted to enjoy the party. And always the refrain, where we laughingly reminded each other that we had no idea how the day would end up.

Well ain't that the truth. We think we know what's going to happen today. But it could go either way. It could go all ways. No matter how many times I remind myself that control is an illusion, no matter how many times I read back into my life and see how I've simply had to hang on and ride the waves that come at me, I still like to think I know how today will go.

Anyway, sometimes I wonder why I feel bogged down, as though I need to recover from something, or need to stay inside my house where it's peaceful and safe. I wonder why the past few years of my life seem to have faded into a dim memory, and why my memory in general is fairly lax.

This morning I spent a fair amount of time reading back through my blog here. Yeah, well I guess I can see why I might feel these things.

So maybe today I can go forward with a little more recklessness, a little more joie de vivre, maybe get a bit of a grip on things. Maybe I'll get up if I hear the owl, and go outside with the spotlight and see. Maybe I'll sleep like a baby through the night and get up and accomplish something tomorrow. Maybe I'll keep writing it down so that I can remember it next year, when today is just a fuzzy notion that hardly seems to exist.