dreams

like I said, these dreams are a mixture between reality and...
I had a dream four years ago, the year after Bob died. where he came into a scene from my memory when I was six years old. I was six, and he was dead in my dream (he had died the year before) and he walked across the room and grabbed me by the neck, pinned me to the wall and breathed a very important, URGENT message to me. I don't remember it. But I do remember a year later having a dream where he and I were once again united, hanging out, on a much more even level. we were able to talk, laugh and share the way we did when I was little. I told him who I was, and the urgency was gone. I understood that he was gone, but that we were still conversing. And two nights ago, I had another dream, but in this one he was gone, and I was participating in the "cleaning" of his estate. We were turning his property in Unionville into a community forum, a gathering place for community events. He had a box of pictures that I looked through and found pictures of him as a guy my age, he was really good looking and had a beautiful smile, and pictures of him in SF in the 60's, with a lotus on his belly and a group of people who understood along with him. There were pictures of his whole life and they showed me the most beautiful person that I had only seen glimpses of. He was dead and gone, but I was learning about him. He had hundreds of bikes hanging in the rafters of his house and we were cleaning it out, I found a beautiful bike and one of the people helped me fix it up. I worked on it and got a lot of people to gather around, pick up a broom, and the next thing I knew we were relaxing and enjoying the gathering space we had created from Bob's old dusty barn. I knew he would have loved it, this was the lodge he wanted to build when he was alive and we had it built. Community.
The night before I had a dream of a five pointed astrological phenomenom that I knew signaled the coming of the collective unconscience, it was a mark of a higher awareness. Brent had told me the numbers for five (ever noticed how many countries have a five pointed star on their flag) and I was a glowing mass in the heavens that made a five pointed star.
Last night was the third powerful dream, a collective of teenagers, younger than myself and aware, very aware, the Artech's gathered (very likely in BC?) and they had a metal studio, high tech and industrial (I remember marveling at the ability to harness industry).they told me there names, introduced a eachother one by one and i felt welcome.
They were rolling steel, and one guy (the one I really connected with) was explaining how you have to measure the steel to roll it, taking into account the curvature. They had a part of the workshop where they could make long steel tubes, another where they made rolled sheet metal, and everyone was nineteen, maybe twenty.
I learn a lot in my dreams, I learn about relationships to people. With Bob, even though he's been dead for five years, I still feel like we have a conversation going, it just takes months between episodes. I feel like I tell him about my life and I learn about his, and its him and me, and we're still Calvin and Hobbes, a fire fighter and a water heater, and old couple, a dummy and his mummy. With other people, I have a house that I live in, that people come to visit, and I have a world that I travel in where I meet beatiful people on the edge of the new world, call them what you will, I see the people and I meet them.

fingers crossed

just got those essays sent off. whew. if things go my way, I'll be interviewing, convincing them that there is no better canidate, then heading off on my way to Pine Ridge next fall. If things don't go my way, I'll deal with them just the same.
i made a map the other week, before I was even planning on applying to teach on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The map had cities across the country on it, no roads, no state boundaries, just the names of cities.
Here's the list:VancouverSeattleOlympiaPortlandEugeneDavisSanFranciscoBlackRockCitySaltLakeCityBoisePocatelloHelenaStLouisTwinCities and last but not least, Pine Ridge.
Yeah, it was on there, long before I even thought of teach for america or anything remotely related to getting a job there. I just wanted to go there, I wanted to see the delapadated arch that hangs in the entry way to the wounded knee cemetary, I wanted to see the place that crazy horse and sitting bull and black elk and thousands of others who never made it into the white history of the wild west believed to be the center of the universe, where life begins and where all life on this earth ends.
My Grandma told me the other day that My Grandpa Ed taught on the Pine Ridge Reservation for a while. Strange, I'd call it a coincidence but if you look at the numbers, there are no such thing.

essays

struggling through application essays here, trying to fit what normally I
would say in a handful of keystrokes into five hundred words.
And trying to fit what took me the last four years to figure out
into five hundred words.