"Nuts to That!"

Here at the Firefly, after morning Mass at the Cathedral, a photograph peers down at my slouching pained frame on sofa below. A dirt road leads into a grassy woodland paradise. Beneath, the words of Henry David Thoreau challenge: Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've always imagined.

This, after nightmares, once again.

I had been seeking some few acres upon which to build the Betmaryam (House of Mary) so that I could be her maidservant and live a life always imagined. Well, not always.

I have imagined many existences, especially since my death over three years ago, and long since the constant pain became my companion, 22 years ago.

Now, at a time of my life of veritable freedom to do what ever dream enters the imagination, I comprehend the reality. As my mother used to say to foolishness, "Nuts to That!"

I found four acres east of Hoagland. No wooded site, but a decent building site with a row of trees behind, shielding the old farmhouse on the back six acres. The farmhouse dwellers, charming people, had sold the front four acres a year ago, at a fair price. The wife had planted many trees, bulbs, and grass on the acres, as they had intended to build a small house there. I called the man who is now trying to sell the parcel he purchased a year ago, with advice to not pay over a certain amount per acre. The man was indignant with my offer, even my increased offer. That was that.

So it was back to the subdivision Lot 77. Such a holy number it is! Friends drove me there because I needed advice--and my back too intensely painful to drive myself. So how was I going to drive to the four acres, anyway? How was I going to mow it, plant a wind screen, shovel the drifted snow, and still get up the backbone to drive a distance to the Cathedral for Mass?

My friends wisely told me that my concerns of being in the subdivision were minor. I can more easily manage the small yard; I can plant bushes to help mask the large, looming house 12 feet or less from the small Betmaryam. The train is far enough away, it will be fine. It is the best of both worlds, they say. Yes, I agree and agree to sign the final paperwork.

After all, I must be realistic.

My dreams last night became nightmares.

Today I think about the direction of my dreams--the dreams I have in the daytime, of the freedom to go and do and be. If I had my way, I would live in the country with much space and woods and a little dirt road leading back, winding even, into the paradise unknown. I would be able to take care of it with ease. I would paint and write and go to Mass daily, effortlessly. I would not be alone sometimes but othertimes yes. I would not have pain.

Maybe I would run a Catholic coffeehouse-bookstore with quaint discussion groups and Scripture studies. Maybe even Gazelle would come with her husband and get her deception cleared as to locutions and such coming forth from an unforgiving soul which has withdrawn from the Church for 20 years, developing its own spirituality in the interim span.

"Go confidently," advises Thoreau. "Live the life you've always imagined."

"Deny yourself," advises Jesus. "Pick up your cross daily and follow Me."

And where do You go, my sweet Jesus--my precious Lamb of God? You go to Calvary, to be crucified, to die for all of us in all time and creation, frontwards and backwards and present moment. You go then to the tomb and down to the netherworld, and then to teach a bit more and show the way of resurrection before ascending to Heaven. O Agnus Dei!

Go confidently in the direction of Jesus' dream for you, my dear foolish nutcase. Don't live the life you've always imagined, for it isn't about you! You must die to yourself in order to live.

This is the truth of the matter. Thoreau's words look good scripted beneath an idyllic photography of a dirt road wending back into grassy woodlands.

The truth of the matter is that you have died to that world, and thus your dreams must coincide with the world in which you exist. It is another place, a place between worlds, a thin space where reality exists as sharp and breath-taking as a knife in your back and smelling salts to your soul.

So it is not Lot 77, lovely as it is; nor is it the four acres east of Hoagland. Neither matter in the direction of dreams or living out imaginings. It is what Lot 77 represents, what the four acres represents. Both realities mean dying to self into the painful alone of a huge brick wall extending forever from left to right, just beyond the rise in the dirt road wending its way back into the photo-woods.

Go confidently to the cross. Pick it up, pick it up! Die to your otherwise dreams and live the life you can barely stomach to imagine, for this is the life of self-renunciation, of mortification, of finding the wending road within and waiting for grace to traverse it, pain and all.

Henry David Thoreau, the idea is lovely and dreamy and imaginative. But it isn't realistic for most, if any. Not really. So nuts to those words and what they represent--unless you came to desire, after your physical or mental decline and passing, to have a photograph of the Cross above them.