Paradise Lost?

Last night I dreamed I was walking from a campsite toward a public transportation station of some sort. My luggage and gear had been carefully packed and scheduled for pick-up and delivery to my same eventual destination. So I walked with no encumbrances, not even a purse.

I ended up wandering unknowingly from the beaten path (busy, trafficked city streets) to more and more remote roads. I felt magnetically drawn away, enticed in a subliminal way I suppose, by the increasingly quieter options. Eventually I ended up on a dirt road surrounded by aging trees and broken fences overgrown with tangled vines and realized, “I’m lost – really, really lost.”

Just about then I happened onto a beautiful clearing where a log cabin sat right next to a sprawling crystal-clear lake (with water clarity sort of like the bottomless gravel pit Fritz and I used to visit at the lake). A young family with four children lived there. They took me in quite willingly and graciously, with a serene hospitality that might be expected at a bed and breakfast. They seemed unable to comprehend my need to get back on track with MY life. What? Go where? And why?

They couple told me their story. Years before they had staked their claim as hikers who frequented the spot to tent-camp – then later married, built their dream homestead, and started a family. They seemed to not need or want the rest of the world. I had no idea how they paid their bills. But wait – what bills? There were there by virtue of squatter’s rights alone, and used no public services. When asked about getting groceries and sending the kids to school, they gave incomplete answers or conversation faded into some other topic. I felt a sense of panic rise inwardly simply because their lives seemed so real, and yet also such a blur when seen through my own focus. I couldn’t engage – not really.

I became more and more agitated when I realized there was no coverage for my cell phone (which was clipped to my belt), so I couldn’t call for help. Not only that, but my cell phone and hearing aid chargers were back in my luggage! Not that there would have been an electrical outlet anyway. However, that seemed odd since the home was beautifully furnished and not primitive at all. There must have been an energy source coming from somewhere?

The interesting part to this whole dream was the tension between accepting their lifestyle of relative Paradise and feeling pulled out of duty or practice to return to my own. I didn’t want to leave the refreshing reality of the place, and yet I obviously didn’t belong there. At one point I looked outside the front door to watch one of the kids swimming in the lake (which was right there, not five feet away), doing side-to-side somersaults in a sort of aquatic ballet. I realized with a pang that I longed for the same kind of expressive freedom but was unable to jump in and join the choreography.

Then I woke up.