You know how you write things down, things that strike you as wise or particularly well put? My handwritten journal is full of quotes I wanted to remember, things that had particularly timely meaning for me when I first came across them. Yet when the pages are filled the book is tucked away and doesn’t see the light of day for a long time.

From now on, when I finish a journal, I’m going to flip through it once and read the quotes before packing it away.

Then there’s naming the journal, a practise Anais Nin (diarist extraordinaire) kept. She wrote a title down before she made her first entry in a new diary, and found that by the time she came to the last page, the name made a perfect title for what the diary contained.

I called the last one ‘New Life’ and the current one ‘A Weight is Lifted.’

***

And dreams. If I look back about three months after writing one down, it seems that they have come true ... or maybe it takes this long to understand them. For instance, I had a dream at the end of November; I didn’t understand the meaning of the dream and thought it might be about my unconscious social morals.

Here it is:

I am looking at a photograph of several young children.
Behind me, someone looks over my shoulder and says to the man I have recently slept with: These children must be your lovely children!

His children? He’s married?
What have I done?
I feel a mortified regret.

Then he says: These are my brother’s children.
I am not married.

Immense and immediate relief erupts in me.

***

Today I understand the dream and am comforted. In hindsight it is much easier to comprehend its message.

***

Paraphrasing Joe DiMaggio about Marilyn Monroe when asked if he hoped to remarry her:

“I care about her deeply and will always be there if she needs me, but I can’t live with her without quarrelling.”

***

I made a copious amount of notes on the Women Who Run with the Wolves book.

“Human beings are imperfect; one must learn to live with the uncertainty.”

“It is easier to throw away the light and go back to sleep... For with it, we clearly see all sides of ourselves and others, both the disfigured and the divine and all conditions in between.”

“With this penetrating light one can see past the bad action to the good heart, one can espy the sweet spirit crushed beneath hatred, one can understand much instead of being perplexed only.
This light can differentiate layers of personality, intention, and motives in others. It can determine consciousness and unconsciousness in self and others. It is the wand of knowing. It is the mirror in which all things are sensed and seen. It is the deep, wild nature.”

“A woman must choose her friends and lovers wisely . . . a lover can engender and/or destroy even our most durable connections to our own cycles and ideas.”

“If there is but one force which feeds the root of pain, it is the refusal to learn beyond this moment.”

“To love pleasure takes little. To love truly takes a hero who can manage his own fear.”

“...the skeleton ... when one tiny bone is out of place, chipped, spurred, subluxed, it hurts the integrity of the whole. When the Life/Death/Life nature in oneself or in a relationship is suppressed, the same occurs.
One’s life limps along, catches, hobbles, protects movement. When there is hurt to these structures and cycles, there is always interruption of libido. Love is not possible then. We lie under the water; just bones, drifting back and forth.”

“This power in knowing the Life/Death/Life nature awaits lovers who go beyond running away, who push beyond a desire to find themselves safe.”

“There is no knowledge more preserving, more nutritive, more strengthening of love than this.”

“...Untangle her Life/Death/Life nature with tenderness.”

“A tear, heard by anyone of heart, is understood as a cry to come closer.”

“There is probably nothing a woman wants more from a man than for him to dissolve his projections and face his own wound.”

The Life/Death/Life nature is the ebb and flow tendency of reality. For instance, in a marriage the husband is not Prince Charming every day and the wife is not forever Sleeping Beauty. Things are not always pretty; we do not consistently feel and act loving. Often we mistake this to mean that love is gone and won’t be back. We don’t accept these ‘down’ or ‘death’ aspects of the very normal cycle of life and relationships.

***

And from Pain, the Fifth Vital Sign:
“Pain on the right side is about the future, and pain on the left is about unresolved things from the past.”