I woke the other morning with the dream tree echoing in my mind. Off center. Unnatural. Butchered. Altered. Sad. These are the words that describe the tree. Its image stays with me.
In my dreams, there is a "school age" white girl with long, slightly wavy hair - the ends feathery and brushing mid-back. I believe she is my mind's symbol for myself when I am watching from third person perspective. I have seen her in other dreams.
She was leaning against a white painted fence without the vertical pickets. A black book bag sits at her feet and she is reading in front of a one story suburban house while standing beneath the tree's canopy. A boy shows up and I shift perspective between the boy and the girl as they have a conversation. I don't know if the conversation is important. The autumn sun is setting, streaking gold and plum strokes across the sky.
Suddenly, while I am the girl, I fixate on the tree and realize that the trunk is far to my right and the canopy is simply the rounded leaves growing from a single, long branch with its tip resting on the roof of the house to my left about 25 feet away. The leaves to the right of the trunk don't overhang the trunk more than a few short feet. I look up. Someone has woven a wire lattice for a creeper plant to twine itself, giving the illusion of a fuller canopy than it really is. All other branches have been cleanly sawed off, close to their source.
This realization saddens me, saddens her. The tree's natural growth, it's organic symmetry has been brutally altered to meet the aesthetic preferences of those dwelling in the house and the city. The result is a this dramatic lopsidedness. Unbalance.
The tree is me. The sadness that wells in me stems from the part that does not like what she sees. I play my role well at work, at home. But for all the effort I have butchered parts of myself that I held sacred to cater to "their" symmetry, "their" ideals. I think it's interesting that the RIGHT side of the tree (right brain) is the side that suffers all the cuts while the LEFT side of the tree (left brain) weighs heavily on this house for support. It hangs high because of it, and serves it's purpose well, but it's still fake.
How to turn what I built on the left side into genuine achievement and how to re-teach the right side to grow again without detracting from the left?
No comments:
Post a Comment