I made it home late Saturday night. The twelve hour drive home was smooth and clear. I slept most of the way as though I hadn’t slept in months. Mount Everest has been lifted from my crushed body.
Before I drove up to defend my thesis, I dreamed that my car had broken down and wouldn’t start. “I can’t go any further,” I told a mechanic, who looked it over from one end to the other and concluded, “You have burnt out this entire system! I can fix it, but the repairs will cost you just over $2000.” In my dream, I about fell apart and cried, “I don’t have two dollars much less two thousand!” I woke up with an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. Almost all of my dreams, the vivid and salient ones, eventually come to be. Car trouble, on top of everything else, would be more than I could solve. Completing my dissertation was consuming all of my energy and attention and running me into the ground. I told my advisor that I didn’t think I could go much further. Car trouble would simply be too much.
Then I remembered that my fall tuition was just over $2000… and the car was me. What seemed like a horrible dream suddenly became a dream of comfort. A promise: Once the semester is complete, and you’ve graduated, repairs will take place, and you’ll be as good as new.
I am as good as new. A warm, nourishing energy has filled every cell in my body since I defended successfully and walked away with my degree, as though I’ve been given a life force transfusion. Doors that were closed will now open. Things that were impossible are now probable. Like living, sustaining the health and well being of my children and I, eating well, staying clean and warm.
Other dreams also came to be. In one dream, I entered a room a student and left something more, and outside the building, the man I had been dating, Jimmie, was waiting outside. He was a long leaf in a clear body of water surrounding the building like a moat. In waking life, Jimmie decided he would wait for me by the lake surrounding campus, just a few blocks from the building where I defended. When my meeting ended, he was sitting by the water.
He entered my life a tremendous blessing. Had he not been with me, I may not have graduated. I received calls from my committee on the drive up and spent many an hour in the car making final revisions, meeting with my advisor by phone, and finishing a presentation. Last minute academic expenses that would have stopped me in my tracks, he paid without a second thought, and the bed and breakfast was spectacular. An “environmental inn,” the beautiful, elegant home-like setting made me feel as though I belonged in the town. I last left it feeling like an outsider. This time, I felt invited. Welcomed. Soothed with a hospitality that healed the old pain. We enjoyed the many warm fires, the sauna, the endless wine and tea… a very stark contrast to the squalor and mayhem that came before.
Every now and then, I thought about people I once knew in town, one love in particular, and oscillated between periods of cool release and moments of piercing tenderness. I felt loved in a very gentle, quiet, relieved way. Beheld. As though the swells of life giving joy were healing not only to me but to those who were still connected to me, deep down.
The landscape of my life transformed in one night like the swapping of a stage set. The sunlight across the city was beautiful on Friday, glistening on all the snow, when I hiked up Bascom hill, my arms wrapped around my thesis and all the precious paperwork as though my life depended on it, and I delivered it to the graduate school. I cannot begin to explain the complications and roadblocks that arose before that moment, to the very end, and how they each dissolved in a series of the most striking coincidences. I feel very much that, even with the intense, prolonged hard work, I was carried to that moment. When I left the building, it was literally all downhill from there.
My advisor cried, and another member of my dissertation committee, one who knew the story leading up to that day, cried too. I sobbed. And then I danced. I danced all over town! Along the water. Down State Street. In and out of the capitol. I’ve been dancing ever since.
