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Crescent Dragonwagon

dreaming, as two decades join: “rare hare of hope,” part one

By Crescent Dragonwagon

My unconscious, in the dreams it chooses to deliver to me, seems to view my conscious mind as a kindergartner. When it gives me the information that it's decided I need, it does so in very simple terms. Signpost

Simple, but strange. Like the dream I had two nights ago, just before one decade ended and another began.

And, though simple to me, because spoken fluently in my own private symbolic language, not quickly told to others, who have their own private languages. Just so you know, I won't complete the telling in this post.

But hang in there with me, please.

The seeming centerpiece of the dream was Boundin' , a short animated film for children which I'd recently seen twice.

Understand this: I didn't even like the film much the first time I saw it. I don't as a rule like cartoons or animated films, so it had that to get over. 

And though I agreed with the movie's values, liked its  rhymes and engaged with the story it told — featuring a lamb and jackalope, a mythical animal that's half-jackrabbit-half antelope — if you'd asked me did I like it, I'd have said at best that Jackalope4it was "cute", just barely a compliment. 

The problem was, besides my prejudice against animation, I found the film too "message-y."

See, I tend to view anything like a visible "and the moral is" in a film or work of fiction as… well, call it vulgar, or obvious (feel free to call me a snob, too, while you're at it).

Of course most works of art do have a message, or in some way reflect the underlying values of their Basf4boundincreator: how could it be otherwise? It's just that by my lights, the message or moral should be invisible as such. When you see a message, it's like the artist's slip is showing. And isn't the idea of a slip that it makes everything fit smoothly,  effortlessly, in no way calling attention to itself? If a slip's hanging down below the hemline, not only is not serving its purpose, it makes both the outfit and the person wearing it look bad.

So, I discounted the film. Or at least I thought I did.

My unconscious had other ideas.

a short film, in a small place


Now, I wouldn't have seen this particular film at all, let alone twice, had
David, my partner, not decided to become the impresario of West-West Family Flicks, which takes place monthly at the tiny Westminster West (Vermont) Library. Boundin' was one of the shorts he'd selected to show before the December feature (some of the attentive audience, below).

Audience

Where, exactly, is the West-West library located,
relative to where you are? Look closely at the signpost (in the picture, by David, at the top of this post), which is thoughtfully placed a few feet south
of the library, and you'll get a pretty good idea.

You can also infer, from that signpost, that to those of us who live here, Westminster West is the center of the universe.

And maybe anybody, who lives anywhere, should feel that way about where they live.

welcome to Vermont: a matter of scale

The library is tiny because West-West is tiny: too tiny to even be listed on City-Data.com's "Very Small Towns and Villages" page, which includes only those municipalities with Church, west populations under a thousand.

But to give you some idea, Westminster proper has a whopping 275 people, while North Westminster boasts 271. West-West does not even a post office (our mailing address is in Putney) or a phone exchange (ours is Saxtons River).

Living here is not that big a change for me; I lived in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, population 1900, before moving 060325_immigration_vlrg_12p.widec to West-West in 2002-2003. But for David, who followed a year or two later, it was a larger change. He'd lived previously in Los Angeles, which has a population of 3,833,995 people.

Heck, a good-sized demonstration in Los Angeles, like the immigration rights rally in 2006 (pictured left), can draw almost as many people as the whole population (623,908) of the state of Vermont, which, as Vermont's Senator Patrick Leahy remarked at the time, in exactly this context (scale), "makes you think."

But Westminster West, though post officeless,  has a church (above right) which also serves as a community center. It has a graveyard.

And, it has a library.

Libraries are esteemed in Vermont.

Bev And now, thanks to David, librarian Bev Major (left, with some young library patrons), the Board of the Library, and the Vermont Department of Libraries, the Westminster West also has a monthly family movie night.

what dreaming brings

And yes, we are coming to that dream of mine. The one which included Boundin'.

And also, strangely, the Holocaust.

Hearts y And also the dear friend who traveled with me through the terrible period following Ned's death and with whom I traveled through some terrible things in her life.

And David Letterman.

And then, later, as I thought about this dream and the coming decade, a few other things: a New Yorker article about China, the U.S., and where they stand in relation to each other on the development of green energy technologies.

And a beautiful night-time walk under the almost-full moon on a snowy Vermont night at the very  end of a decade.(The picture below, NO KIDDING, was taken by DK at 11:30PM on December 30, 2009, without a flash…

Road by moonlight


under the full moon… it's lit by ambient moonlight only!)

Moon tree sil

Now you see why it might take a bit of time to tell you about both this dream and its aftermath. Decoding is involved, and translation.

Yet dreams, like lives, are an unending series of unlikely juxtapositions. Which may or may not make sense.

When they do seem to make sense, is it because they actually have it, a sense which we  only saw because, finally, we looked?

Or is it because we choose, by an act of willful creation, to give them that sense?

Perhaps in that case what such unlikely juxtapositions (whether in dreams or our waking lives), yield to us isn't sense so much as meaning.

And assistance.

All the things I mentioned above? The Holocaust, Letterman, the film? They were connected, by my unconscious, to do that: to give meaning and help, reassurance.

And that's what I, at least, needed at this moment of endings and beginnings.

It was the end of a decade that had Valentinebegun (personally) with Ned's death on November 30, 2000 (a picture taken of us at a Valentine's Day benefit a few years before that, left), a loss that would knock over most of my life's other dominoes, ultimately leading to my leaving the community in which I'd spent 33 years of my life, and in which, I had been certain, I would remain for the duration.

At the very moment of Ned's death, on a larger stage an election was being stolen. (He died without knowing George Bush would be president. A small mercy, I think.)

And the following year, the worst attack on American soil in history, 9-11, would take place. 

And the end of that same decade, which concluded with the election of Barack Obama, a narrowly-missed world-wide financial meltdown, and the most horrific, ugliest, frightening, dysfunctional partisanship I've witnessed in my lifetime… who wouldn't want reassuring?

Janus
And, but, yet, somehow — personally — loving, again, my life, in another home, another community. And sharing that life with another, a second, dear partner and beloved companion. (Above: Janus,
the two-faced Roman god, god of doorways, gates, beginnings, endings,
looking forward and backward. January is named after him. Grief/joy,
old/new. Like a clay pot shattering because the plant it holds has grown too
large & vigorous to be contained, I sometimes think our hearts must break to contain so
many opposites, gifts & subtractions.
..)

Maybe you, too, when you hear this dream, or even this bit of it, can find another bit of what Boundin' calls "the rare hare of hope."

Rare, not only meaning "precious", but because while there are always reasons to hope, it often seems as if there are many more reasons to despair.

And yet.

I hope you too go into this new phase with hope. Hope even as we "bound and rebound", as we spin this shiny new decade, and watch it whirl, and wait to see how it lands. Up or down? Heads or tails?

When we move from 2019 to 2020, how will we be characterizing this time we don't yet, can't yet, know? What will the best and worst lists, the compendiums of significant Hearts yadvance, have to say about what we went through?

Who, on a personal level, will we have lost? And who will have entered our lives?  

With decades as with days, it's like genius Shakespeare, in the character of Brutus, said the eve before battle:

Oh,
that a man might know
The end of this day’s business ere it come!
But it
sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known
.

But amidst all the unknowns, there is one end of which I am certain. 

I know it partly because of the deep reassurance that dream (which I'll you about next time) brought to consciousness. And I know it because I know that nothing is wasted on the writer.

I know that however this new decade lands, at the very least, for sure … it's tales. And, whether we are readers or writers, tellers or listeners of these tales — with them, we all win.

 Dobrin portrait


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Filed Under: Crescent Dragonwagon, self-understanding, personal growth Tagged With: 2010, appreciation, Arkansas, boundin, Bounding, bounding, change, community, compassion towards self and others, Current Affairs, David Koff, death, death, Eureka Springs, Film, films for children, friendship, future, George Bush, gradual transformation, grief, grief & grieving, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, hope, Hope, jackalope, Janus, libraries, love, love, movies, narrative, natural world, Ned Shank, new decade, partisanship, partisanship, Pixar, Pixar, positivity, resilience, Vermont, Vermont, writing

Comments

  1. Rose-Anne says

    January 18, 2010 at 1:42 pm

    I had a very wise and somewhat pessimistic friend challenge my notion that we learn something from every failed relationship (though, as an aside, I’m not even sure I believe that the end of a romance constitutes a “failed relationship). I had to conclude that I need to believe that I learn something from the difficulty and the heartbreak because otherwise it’s just too awful to contemplate a purposeless pain. So I like the themes you are building in this piece and I do hope part two is in the works! Happy New Year to you, sweet Crescent.
    PS Though I’m not on Twitter, I love your tweets. They make me happy and they make me think. I loved that quote about “practice is practice” so much that I wrote it on an index card and placed it on my desk to remind me that in everything we do, we’re always practicing. It encourages me to keep trying.

  2. Barbara H. says

    January 28, 2010 at 11:07 am

    Ah, dear Crescent. I’m not on Twitter but I’ve subscribed to your Tweets to see how this ending/beginning with Aunt Dot is going. Such bittersweetness with death – the pain, the loss, the rediscoveries of memory, forgotten or misplaced objects, the sorting, the wondering of decision-making – to keep, not keep, pass on. So many emotions, sometimes tamped down because too much to bear at this time of much needed action just to get through the accumulations of life so one can move at a later time into a quieter time for grief and contemplation. I’m so happy for Bookman, a “print” angel if there ever was one. It makes that difficult dispersal easier. My thoughts and love are with you and all of yours as I go outside to work in my woods and contemplate my own losses.

  3. Uhuru iman says

    February 3, 2010 at 6:20 pm

    Plz ask david where can i purchase
    “BLACK MAN’S LAND TRILOGY”. He produced it in 1972-73.
    email:heruimansav@yahoo.com

  4. Crescent Dragonwagon says

    February 8, 2010 at 11:00 pm

    Ill forward this to him and I know hell get in touch ASAP.

  5. Lori says

    March 9, 2010 at 12:13 pm

    Its uncanny how I can have these thoughts rolling around in my head and not have a way to organize them. A way to put them together and retell them so I better understand them. You do that for me every time I read your blog. I guess that is why you are the writer.

Read Aloud with Crescent and Mark

NOT A LITTLE MONKEY, by Charlotte Zolotow, illustrted by Michelle Chessaree

"So, the little girl climbed into the big waste-basket and waited." ' Oh no,' said her mother, ' we don't want to throw you away.'"There are many ways to express love and the need for attention. Here, a busy mother and her just-a-bit naughty little girl tease each other affectionately — the little girl making her point without even uttering a word.That's today's story time — read aloud by the author's daughter at Crescent Dragonwagon's Writing, Cooking, & Workshops, with Mark Graff's "text support" and discussion."Just right for two-to-fours, the humor of this true-to-life story of a mischievous little girl who blocks her mother's attempts to clean house will elicit giggles from the lollipop set." Kirkus Reviews

Posted by Crescent Dragonwagon's Writing, Cooking, & Workshops on Thursday, June 4, 2020

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