Forgetting and remembering the dream

Oct. 27, 2005

Dear Julie,

These days of waning sunlight, sleep holds tight and blankets me in protection against the new chill. I want sweet foods and more sleep and sunlight.

"Winter Blues" some people call it. One theory holds that some people produce melatonin in greater amounts as the days darken and nights lengthen. Darkness produces melatonin, the hormone that makes us sleep, in the pineal gland. The pineal gland is the so-called "third eye," in esoteric traditions the gateway between the physical and spiritual worlds.

Light is the treatment for high levels of melatonin.

My favorite among the list of prescribed treatments is a vacation to someplace warm and sunny. I can spell Kauai.

Many people who once lived in New Orleans have their own special blues right now. They have different lives far away. Some still don't know what became of other members of their family. They are like sleepwalkers, going about the day-to-day practicalities not knowing when they will wake up and resume living.

On C-SPAN, Wynton Marsalis was asked whether he would now write music inspired by the tragedies Hurricane Katrina brought his hometown of New Orleans. If it happens, Marsalis said, the music probably will not sound like a dirge. It probably will be the kind of music slaves sang after leaving the fields at the end of each day. Blues to help themselves forget.

Rumi said sleep is a forgetting.

One who has lived many years in a city, as soon as he goes to sleep,

Beholds another city full of good and evil, and his own city vanishes from his mind.

He does not say to himself,

"This is a new city: I am a stranger here";

He thinks he has always lived in this city and was born and bred in it...

The physical world has shaken us up lately. Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, epidemics. These sound like biblical times. Perhaps they're times for making our spiritual selves, the selves who know how to dream, come alive in the physical world. That means doing whatever it is our love of the Creation demands and opening our arms to each other instead of hunkering down for the next storm.

On Salon.com, Larry Blumenfeld writes of Marsalis in a TV interview "describing the black faces on CNN looking for lost mothers and fathers as calling up a historical memory of Southern slave families torn apart."

These hundreds of years later, we are excavating old territory, as if in a dream.

Rumi asks:

What wonder, then, if the soul does not remember her ancient abode and birthplace?

Since she is wrapped in the slumber of this world, like a star covered by clouds? --

Especially as she has trodden so many cities and the dust that darkens her vision is not yet swept away.

When will we awaken? The world is begging to know.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.