Chapter 18. Fall

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over.

Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., writer (11 Nov 1922-2007)

I have a dream.

DREAM. November 1997. 

I am driving on a road in a car and all of a sudden there is a huge opening.

At the moment of passing through the cave-like opening I know it leads immediately to a cliff drop off. 

The fall is dangerous, potentially life threatening. Sensing the car going over the ledge, my hands catch onto the side edges of the concrete or rock opening and I grab on while my vehicle falls into the chasm to the river far far below. 

Determinedly I hold onto grooves in the rock and slowly, methodically, carefully make my way back onto the rock ledge.

It was many months later that I think more about this dream image and find some solace in recalling it.

A few words of explanation here. I read in Dreams and Healing (p 99), 

“A car is very close to the ego. It does what we want it to do, obeys our will, and serves us in the outer world… 

it represents a certain amount of energy available to the ego to use as it goes about its task in life... a kind of mechanical functioning.”

I am about to lose my mechanical, default ways of moving through life as driven by ego. Over the cliff, into the chasm went my understanding of marriage, my role of wife, my egoic self.

Though certainly not the only fall along the way, it was a great fall.

“Fall”- by Peter Mayer

What if the highest destination 

Of any given human life
Was not a place that you could reach if 

You had to climb
Wasn’t up above like heaven 

So no need to fly at all
What if to reach the highest place 

You had to fall

Fall, like a drunkard on your face 

Like a parachuter jumping from a plane
Fall, like an astronaut from space 

Or an acrobat from making a mistake

And what if all the sages 

Talking about realms out of reach
Would memorize the pages 

Of gravity
What if getting to the highest place is 

Like learning what you know
Or like going to where you are now 

Like coming home

Fall, like Adam falling down 

From the strange, unearthly angels whence he came
Fall, finding a way of trusting in the ground 

As if the highest and the lowest places 

Are the same

What if the highest destination 

Wasn’t up above at all
What if, to reach the highest place 

You had to fall
What if you had to fall.