Birthday Dream

I was fighting a great boa constrictor. I assumed it was a metaphor.  It was as tall as me and I was wrestling to keep the head away from my face. I assumed it was a metaphor.  It was my snake I’m sure, But I’d been left it by someone I thought a friend but it was all I could do to keep control of it. 

I thought of Jacob wrestling with God. 

I thought of a time decades before when I was faced with a writhing mountain.  There was an eruption and the whole peninsula was breaking off and mudslides were occurring, Two mad cap  friends were riding in a motorcycle and sidecar off to the east laughing hysterically.  

I was dumbdtruck and probably afraid at the mass of snakes rising up from the earth. It reminded me of when I as a child nearly a youth and I was running and jumping from rocks to rocks and found myself surrounded in a huge snake pit going a city block and I kept momentum and jumping or I’d have fallen in,  They were probably garter snakes but they could have been rattlers. It was southern Manitoba and I was alone and successfully skillfully leapt  from one rock to another till I’d cleared them

“This isn’t right,” I said to a friend who I did not see but sat in the room witnessing me wrestling with the snake. Because it seemed attached to me I couldn’t put it in a jar .   I felt too I couldn’t let go of the thing or it would escape and drag me away.

“The friend agreed, “That isn’t right”.  

I woke then thinking of my dog Madigan who had been having such difficulties with adolescence before we left him. 

 I felt my genitals and they were were unchanged, limp and like a large worm but clearly not the powerful snake in my dreams. 

My back hurt, a sharp pain at the base of my spine, as I swung my legs and sat up  

There seemed such a disconnect between the great hard writhing snake of my dream and the penis between my legs which reminded me of the penis I saw in the national gallery the other day, there between the legs of Jesus as a child in one painting and another the penis of the child Saint John. 

I realized I was in a new day. It was my birthday . I was a seventy old nan and I was still wrestling with the old equation.  

I looked at the lovely woman in bed with me but asleep and dead to the world. I wondered as I had so many times if she would be able to help me with the snake. Adam and Eve and the Apple wasn’t an apple, that’s for sure.

70 years old and I’d write down my dream.  I didn’t want to wake her because it was unpredictable what might transpire.  When I was young there was never any doubt and I had perfect faith.  But one day belief faltered ,  I was so beaten down.  I distrusted myself.  I distrusted her,  So many lies and broken promises.

Now I face God in daily prayer and struggle with the snake.  Of course that’s the devil in the mind.  I’ve no desire to klll or separate myself from it.  I preferred the strength and power of the dream than the childlike worm of the wakening.  

So much of life is this illusion of desire and defeat. 

I’m a 70 yo man and I might as well be 17.  There is no difference in my mind but in my reality there’s resistance and rejection.  I can stand at the helm of a boat and sail through hurricanes. I can ride my harley through storms and across countries. I have done so much but at the very centre of the conflict I am without children which is the snake that others train and at the end of the day see as accomplishment.  For me it’s ever the snake and desire and in life I seek to escape.  I don’t want to fight.  I walk away from love and war.  

“This isn’t right,” 

“That isn’t right.”

Such is love and life,