Into unknown depths, again

Last night I listened to my friend Rob tell of a dream. The dream is simple. He is standing on the shore when he is engulfed by a huge wave crashing over him. Rob, like me, is in mid-life. For as long as I have known him, I have admired his engagement with life. Enthusiastically direct, incredibly honest and simultaneously simple and profound.

We both know a little of Jung's thinking on dreams. My personal belief is that the value of dreams, like so much else in life, is not in any inherent meaning that they might hold, but in the meaning that is created through our own engagement with them. And what is probably most telling in this, is whatever emotional responses a dream invokes in us.

In the silent pause when Rob finishes his story, I suddenly see something, with absolute clarity, which has perplexed me for ten years. What I see so clearly is the meaning of the first story dated in this blog, Into unknown depths, which happens to be (because I do not post pieces chronologically) the last piece before this one that I posted.

The on-going creation of this blog, over the last several weeks has been an amazing, surprising and sometimes totally absorbing experience for me. It is certainly feeding something in me and I know, from the amazing responses I have received to it, some overwhelming, that it is feeding something in others as well. I am extremely chuffed that my stories have managed to entertain, move, and inspire so many people. I have a vague sense that something in this may be much bigger than I anticipated when I posted the first 2 stories.

What I have come to hope more lately, is that this blog might tell a larger story, that not only will each piece tell a story that I hope has beauty and meaning and even inspiration, but that the pieces, as they weave together into a chronological sequence, might tell a larger story, which may turn out to be the blog's real value.

For what I saw in the silence after Rob's story, was how the intense and terrifying symbolism of Into unknown depths, which had perplexed me for so long, perfectly mirrored a larger story taking place over a longer period. And how the journey in that story, like the journeys in all quest stories, is one that, in the different ways we choose to, we must all make.