As I said in Part 3, the whole concept of this dream is centered around home. And home is, of course, a place of safety for the heart.
There are not a lot of places that my heart feels safe in this world. There are few people who it feels safe with, either. This can't solely be blamed on my being a skeptic, a cynic, or a realist, as much as some might try.
The fact is that I am introvert. (What!? I know. You're shocked.) Introverts view the world differently than extroverts. Moreover, there are other personality factors which make some more open than others. I am not one of those. I am a very private person who is very cautious with whom I share the pieces of my heart.
Obviously, though, there is something larger at work here than just the loss of the house I spent so much time in as a kid. I have been there rarely in recent years, especially since my grandparents moved out of it last fall. There was no reason for that sudden slumbering meltdown.
Or was there?
When life gets chaotic and stressful due to outward circumstances, I start to retreat a little within myself, to a place of calm. A haven, if you will. That haven is a complex web consisting of my dearest people, happy memories, and hope for the future. When any of those things get rocked, it takes me awhile to recover.
Stress, too, has a way of eroding my safety net. (To be clear: I was not talking about falling away in my faith or anything so dire as that. These are strictly emotional happenings. I was not and am not having a spiritual crisis of any kind.) When I get overwhelmed I have less time to communicate with my kindreds, less energy to be optimistic about "the future" and, well, when something is directly attacking my happy memories (like awful dreams about the Greyhouse -- good gracious, WHY would anyone dismantle that banister!?) it is harder to cling to them.
Really, I'm surprised that someone has not yet told me that this has got something to do with my being afraid to let go of the past and step into the future. To them I will say: that's not it at all.
As I was listening to it thunderously storm the other morning, feeling as foul and gray as the weather, it occurred to me that what this situation wants is closure. Obviously not the actual reality of the house being sold.
No, but the Greyhouse is being used as a metaphor for many things: namely, the things of life that have been left open-ended. Hanging out there in the universe of my reality with no reconciliation, no closed door, no resolution, no denouement. Just...nothing.
As in the dream when I am pleading with the new owners for "one final walk-through," so it would seem that I desire that for many areas of life. One final chance for clarity.
That isn't how life works, of course. But I? I like for life to make sense. Books, no matter how gritty and convoluted they are, must have a last page. Stories have endings. Movies have credits. Songs don't loop on forever, nor do they cut off abruptly.
But people and friendships and situations, well... that's where it gets tricky. Those things, more than anything else, have a way of disappearing, sight unseen, with the vapors of the wind. Before you could turn your head, they've walked out the proverbial door and there's nothing you can do about it except to wonder why.
I'm not speaking of some great travesty, or even of anything specifically. But looking back over my life the things that still bother me, that still cause me to wonder, are the situations where there was no resolution. No goodbye. Just silent evaporation.
And I'm so over that.
While I have zero control over the fact that strangers are now standing in a house that I will always feel belongs to me, I can wrap the scenario up, at least in my mind, by doing exactly as I've done: writing about it.
Words have always been therapeutic to me. Not only do they allow the truth to escape what might otherwise be a stifling environment, but they don't change and flow and disappear with the moment. Words are constant and steady and lasting. And when I feel as if all is shifty around me, it is these words I am drawn back to.
I write to be, to know, to feel that I am not alone.
I write in search of the truth because, as always, it is the truth which sets us free.
And it is often the freedom to write, to process, to search which leads me to the beauty of truth.
Funny how it goes full circle, yet doesn't just leave my head a dizzy and spinning mess.
Yes, life is funny that way.
