There is something about being away from home that opens your mind. It isn't something that you can be noticed on a day to day level so much, although there are of course days when you are away from home when amazing or unexpected events and realisations about life occur which can change your world. But rather, for me personally, it is a slow change which I tend to notice bits at a time. It is kind of like building something, but unfolding something at the same time, it is to with becoming aware of unexpected strengths and weaknesses which pop up at unusal times and reveal complexities.
I had a really unusual wish as a child. I used to wish that someone could invent a machine. This machine would look something like the metal detector gates at the airport. I used to wish that a machine / computer existed so that a person could pass through the door and once out the other side a book would be ready and waiting, and the book would be all about the person who had just walked through the door. And just off to the side of this gate would be a bench, and you could go and sit on the bench and read all about oneself, ones talents, ones weaknesses, the kinds of troubles that one could expect in ones life due to the circumstances in which one was raised or ones left over emotional family inheritance.
I dreamed last night that I was out in space. As is the way with dreams I have no idea what kind of physical body I was inhabiting, if I was inhabiting one at all. I was clearly not a human body floating in the darkness, not an astronaut nor even an alien, but more like a kind of 'me eye' - just a looking viewing consciousness which was certainly attached to my own individuality. I was looking down on Earth. As the big old me eye sat bobbing amongst the stars it couldn't help but notice how much the Earth looked like a tiny glass ball with a fluffy earthy centre.
The atmosphere around the Earth was SO clean, so glass like and so so inexplicably delicate, like the thinnest of hand blown glass. 'I' felt astounded by this, how, completely exposed, alone and terribly vulnerable we are, how it is the most unique and unusal of circumstances that this tiny we ball of life, like a wee frog in an egg, has managed to survive for as long as it has, the right amount of distance from the sun, with the right amount of gravitational pull from the moon, with the right amount of extraordinarily thin atmosphere around its skies and earth to provide life for the minute little creature that lies within.
Even though I am someone who believes that life in other parts of the Universe is highly likely, I 'realised' in this dream how very rare this occurrence of life in space must be and that if there is another planet inhabited by life somewhere out there, then it must be gazillions of light years and billions of dimensions away. Never to be found.
I don't write about this dream to say that I had any kind of realisation about the state of life that is 'new', only to say that upon waking I realised how limited our time is, here on Earth, and as a consequence how limited my time with my Father really truly is. One day he will die and I will not have him any more. He will be gone from my world. And I will have only memories of him to remind me of how it felt to be in his presence. And one day, in what feels like a long long time from now, but really is not, I will die too and my children will not know how to hold those feelings of my Father close to them any longer.
This little dream, of a delicate little frogs egg floating in the most vast of ponds made me realise that while being away from home and traveling really is necessary for me right now, my family, my whanau are the most important thing to me in this world, in this life, and that it is through them that I truely know myself.
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