morethanenoughtruth

I woke up this morning with a question:  “Who is that person who speaks in a clear strong voice during my dreams?”  The voice is female.  It displays none of the subtle cues alluding to self-doubt that characterizes every other human voice, speaking always conditionally, surrounded with the frippery of adjectives and adverbs.  Whoever she is, she simply knows.  I decided to title her The Knower.

Now, remembering the intensity of the dream, I feel uneasy with the definite article.  This is a conscious entity living at the very core of all that I am.  It surely deserves the intimacy of moniker.  I pull one degree back from the abstract and christen her Knower.  That feels better.  This must be how evolving humanity conceptualized God.  But the voice was unmistakably female, a she.  Knower becomes Knowa.  It is interesting that the strong center of my being is gender defined.  I should think something so basic would be androgynous, even asexual.  Perhaps the true essence of sexuality is defined by much more than genitalia.

Thinking back to past dream encounters, I remember Knowa instructing me in her clear resonant voice to coat every joint with synovial fluid before subjecting them to my body’s weight.  Ever since, I do my morning ballet horizontally, still under the covers, placing my structural components in every position I can imagine and some that I can’t.  It never fails to allow me to move through the day with more fluidity and less joint pain.  At last I throw off the covers, stand and do my morning belly-dance, undulating to the zither in my head.  My inner Catholic does the obligatory spectacles, testicles, watch, and wallet, as a final blessing on this morning ritual.  I smooth my hands over all my curves.  Yes, all of me is accounted for.

First the teeth, then the brain.  Having learned the hard way about losing dreams by waiting too long to record them, after morning ablutions I make a bee-line for the computer.  I Google “knower”, squint at the screen, and groan.  As usual, somebody already thought of it.  There is an entire website defining “The Knower” as exactly what I had intuited.  I am definitely not alone on this lumpy little planet and can relax in the certainty that anything I think of has been thought of before.  There is at least some comfort knowing that I am on the right celestial orb.

It’s comforting to muse about Knowa.  It was she who warned me of my father’s transition in a dream, even as he lay dying.  Asleep in a Virginia motel room, I visioned the deathbed agony happening concurrently in California.  Then in her clear unmistakable resonance she intoned in a voice that covered the horror of the scene like a soft blanket, “We are showing you this because otherwise you would be much too upset.”  She was right.  If I had found, with no forewarning, that note from the Columbus Police Department fastened to my front door, explaining what had happened in my absence, I would surely have died on the spot.  As it was, there was all the guilt associated with being unreachable when my father needed me to tell him one last time that I loved him, but the pain was cushioned by the beautiful knowledge that dreams really can express the actual.  This was my proof that there is surely more than what we can ever know, and that even though I can in no way explain the workings of the Infinite, I know it exists.  It knows my name.  It cares about how I feel.  What greater gift could my father leave me as his last goodbye?

For half a century I had nursed the anguish that he deserted my mother and me when he returned from the war.  If he had loved me, he would never have left.  This bitter thought reminded me of a small box I had found in my mother’s memorabilia.  I remembered there was a letter on air mail stationery inside it addressed to me.  Suddenly I felt driven to find and read the letter sent from Ireland where Daddy holed up during the war as technical backup for the “Little Boy” bomb and its actuator he had invented.  It was still there at the bottom of the third box of letters, photographs, poems and journals I rooted through.  I had glanced at it many years ago but tossed it aside, sneering at the perceived hypocrisy of the thing.

The front of the folded sheet of air-mail paper read, “To My Baby on Her 5^th Birthday.”  He had cut out a picture of the flag and fastened it to the paper with a dressmaker’s straight pin as a decorative touch.  Scotch Magic Mending Tape had yet to be invented.  Opened once again, the letter read:

When God made you, He wrought with the gold and gleam of the stars, with the changing colors of the rainbow’s hues and the pallid silver of the moon.  He wrought with the crimson that swooned in the rose’s ruby heart and the snow that gleams on the lily’s petals.  Then glancing down into His own bosom, He took of the love that gleamed there like pearls beneath the sun kissed waves of the summer sea, and thrilling this love into the form He had fashioned, all heaven veiled its face, for lo, He had wrought you, my Baby……….Daddy

My father loved me.  He did.  He really did.  I wish Knowa had told me that a long time ago, but maybe I wasn’t yet ready to believe it.  Being Knowa, she surely knew.

I will sign this with the name Daddy gave to me.  It means “gift from God.”

 Doro-thea