WHEN WAS YOUR LAST SURREAL MOMENT?
BLOG 39: August, 1998—Four months had passed since living with my parents in a small house in Ho-Ho-Kus, NJ, a community far away from Oakland, California, and New Mexico, where I had been for several years. Two years ago, I had left New Jersey, from my parents’ earlier house, to go out west, to discover my wings, only to injure myself and return to this place of family.
Suburban life had always been a challenge for my free spirit, but it had become even more so since traveling out west and experiencing the openness of the land and sky there. But now, Stefan, a friend I had fallen in love with and had danced with before traveling out west, was visiting. My parents were out of town, and being with him again was like being drunk.
Stefan and I had choreographed and performed a dance together at Omega Institute, a holistic studies center in Rhinebeck, New York State, and while we had gotten very close physically, we had never become full lovers or been in a relationship. He had come to New York from his hometown of Montreal (his parents were Haitian), and although we had become intimate through dance, he had chosen to maintain an element of tension between us that had pulled at me painfully, even when I was out west.
Now as he visited, we went into Brooklyn to see his Caribbean relatives, who were so warm in their touch and way, that I wished I could stay with them longer. But then we went to the ocean, where the piercing grey, blue sky that covered the sand and ocean merged with the orange ball of sun de
scending in the sky. It seemed everyone just sat watching the blue crystal waters of infinity melting inside the sunset.
Nature wrapped herself around Stefan and me for these brief moments that erased time, with even the most hurried stopping to observe. “It’s not surreal, it’s very real,” said Stefan as I mentioned to him how surreal it felt. I agreed with his words, yet there was something surreal in that this moment didn’t belong to us alone. It was a collective experience that moved through us inside a dimension that made no distinctions, had no direction to go, no beginning, no end. It was a kind of “now” that erased even presence itself.
As I sat with Stefan in this magical place, I realized that my love for him, or my feelings of in-loveness that I had held onto for so long, had no future, no life beyond these moments. Together we shared a spark that lit up the space between us. But, it was time for me to take that fire and openness I had experienced in the west, and cool those aching parts of myself—the hunger and fear—inside the clear blue skies of the East Coast, and come home to magic within.
So grateful I was for these days with Stefan, for I was able to close an old chapter, and feel my wings circling around me in love for a more mature life of reciprocal joy.
WHEN WAS YOUR LAST SURREAL MOMENT?
*My recently-published novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, shares a story of coming home. Check it out on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Child-Duende-Journey-Michelle-Adam/dp/099724710X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474233011&sr=8-1&keywords=child+of+duende or at www.michelleadam.net
My last and very strong sense of the surreal occurred three weeks ago. I also wrote a book called Duende, but mine is a fictional story set in Spain in the period leading up to the Civil War. Federico Garcìa Lorca appears as a character.
When I named my two main characters, I took time as their names were important. One character is called Josè Caballero. During the writing of the novel, I discovered that in 1931, Lorca became friends with an Andalusian artist called Josè Caballero…This made me shiver at the time…And I shivered for a long time.
Fiends was published in 2014.
I’m currently involved in a dance production based on Lorca’s Blood Wedding. While preparing some work for this, I discovered that Josè Caballero designed the set for the original production of Blood Wedding in Barcelona in 1933. Blood Wedding has always been my favourite play and when I read this information, I felt that same deep shiver…The surreal and the deep and strong connections with the universe…those deep and inexplicable connections…
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Lizzie, thanks for sharing. I love how we both have novels on Duende, although mine is after Franco dies and yours before he comes into power. As with your writing, the same happened with me. I wrote about the Spanish Gypsies and other details and then what I wrote about I discovered existed in reality afterwards. It sure is surreal. You wonder how that information comes to us…through the collective unconscious or through the worldwide energetic web we are all a part of. It reminds me of when Isabel Allende wrote a book that she had said was inspired by a newspaper article about a murder or some mystery, and later the cops came to her and asked her how she knew what had happened (when she had no idea, but wrote about it in her fiction). It’s a surreal world!
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I suspect there is the deep realness of the Dreaming, into which we step now and then, and the profound surrealness of our current collective situation…..
Anyway, lovely, evocative, familiar post.
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I like how you relate this to dreaming. Sometimes our dreams are much more connected to a “reality” that dreams us all into being. Thanks for sharing and for your comments.
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On the beach…in North Myrtle Beach just about a month ago…I experienced a surreal outpouring of beauty in waves of abundance. The majestic artistry…richness and brilliance…the sensation of the breeze…clouds, sun, waves mixing to provide a cascade of colors. It was like I was being overwhelmed by pure gift.
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Beautiful. There’s nothing like it. I hope you aren’t on there now with this storm. Do you live near there? How are you with this weather?
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