REALIZATION

I had another weird dream last night. I woke up in the middle of the night gripped with fear. I realized with striking clarity that... Doom had slipped into the bedroom under cover of darkness and wrapped itself around me while I slept and ever so slowly began to squeeze me like a constricting serpent, a python or a boa. There was no escape. It had me. It spoke evenly, without inflection. It said this to me:

You are doomed.

And, though it was hidden beneath a dark cloak it did not bother to remove, I knew it was telling the truth. There was no escape.

I pulled on a robe and found my way downstairs, Doom following me like a shadow. I clicked on a lamp, plopped into a chair and stared across the room at Oswald Chambers lying on the coffee table. He was next to Tozer and Chesterton.

The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.

Hmm.

Then I really did wake up, still in bed, but seeing light sneaking in through the shutters. Doom was nowhere in sight, but I got up and checked around anyway, just to make sure. I was thinking, I should go climb a mountain...chuck it all for one day, climb on the dirt bike, ride it to where the road ends in a steep canyon, and start walking, one step at a time, to the top. Then I remembered Chesterton on the coffee table:

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

So instead of chucking it all, I made a cappuccino and wandered out into the cool morning air.

A little later, after I had finished a production session in the studio, I was talking with a friend about all the things going on and the things that are no longer going on when it occurred to me that I have not missed doing the radio show even once since that ended last October. In fact, there was/is the sense of a burden being lifted; a burden I was aware of over the past few years but not one I was willing to fully recognize. Most days I still enjoyed doing the show, mostly, but there was also the weight of something that was often an unpleasant reality I could not escape. There was a shallowness to it all that was wearing me down. Driving up from Colorado Springs to Denver last Friday evening I had one of those moments where it was almost as if I were observing myself from an objective distance and, in the observation was the knowledge that I like myself (or at least my life) more now than I have in a long time.

I shouldn’t be writing here on the blog today. I am on a deadline with the book that looms large this week as next week I will be getting very busy with a new project. I can’t really know what it will be like to take on some new work and still being trying to finish the proposal for the agent to shop so I am trying to wrap up the writing by the end of the month.

I have never been good at steering clear of distractions.