Dragons and Buddhas
Maybe this is poetry, maybe it's disorganized drivel, but it is true. Where is the balance?
Last night, I had a dream that I could transform into a dragon and fight enemies.
Only, I was hesitant to do it. I knew I could. I knew I could tap into that power, be ferocious, vanquish all who threatened my domain. I could breathe fire and beat my giant, blood-colored wings. Blow my foe away, to pieces, defeat them with all of the coiled up power within me. But I did not.
I did not know what that power would do to my loved ones. They were close. They might be blown away, too. In my releasing that force from within me, gales of fire and hurricane winds, I might look around afterward to find the landscape bare and desolate and myself alone.
There are so many parts to a person. Powerful anger that can destroy. Peacefulness that can invite centered thought and being, love that can invite others. How to integrate them all, use them, experience them, as whole being?
I am tired, though I have just slept.
Slept soundly, solidly, a slumber that was also full of active dreams. In these dreams, I was doing, going, accomplishing, and I was surrounded by crowds of old friends and acquaintances doing the same, in support, in solidarity. I was not the only one with dragon capabilities.
I am tired in a way not assuaged by sleep or rest or meditation or a few days off from work. I am not depressed. I am quietly exasperated by the way our world works — this world that we have made for ourselves. A world of going and doing and cheating the system without getting caught — worming our way around the machine, breaking our own rules, because they really don’t work for anyone.
Quietly exasperated and, at least for this moment, feeling all done with trying to figure it out. Why it works the way it does, how I can operate within it. Should I operate within it? And if not, what else? And who else is affected? The consequence of having loved ones who enrich your life with warmth is that everything you do influences them. You are connected, like ducks on a pond. One splashes and everyone gets wet. Maybe it feels good because it’s hot outside. Maybe it’s annoying. Wet, nonetheless.
What is this about, this rambling drivel that goes jarringly from dragons to ducks in a matter of paragraphs?
I don’t know.
That’s not true. I do know. I just don’t know how to say exactly. It is about everything, my whole world, yours, the universe. It is about the minutia of this very day and also all of the days that stretch out behind and before it. This essay, or whatever you want to call it, touches everything, all aspects. And it touches nothing. It is a window into my soul, or it is self-indulgent nonsense. And it is so obscure and raw that I may not even publish it.
I guess if you’re reading this, though, I did.
Always trying to pull themes out of rough stuff like this.
That’s the advice. Read through it, see the themes, punch them up. This writing is driven by frustration with politics, a fight with my husband last night about green beans, worries about money, and anger that we have a world in which we all have to be consumed with worrying about money. My dragon feels the urge to stretch itself tall and use her breath to burn all of the money in the time it takes to snap your fingers.
Not that that would solve anything. The problem isn’t money itself but the motivation to print it, to use it, to build a world in which it is hard not be obsessed with it. A world in which you are fucked if you don’t have it.
The fight was not really about green beans, of course.
It was about anger — his. It crops up all of a sudden and doesn’t seem to have a source or a target. An anger he doesn’t know what to do with, and so it expresses itself through banged pots in the kitchen and under-the-breath cussing. An anger not directed at me or our kids but that nevertheless, permeates our home atmosphere and pushes my shoulders up into my ears.
What is that anger? My dragon self knows it. And just like I keep the dragon in check in my own way, only letting her loose when we have HAD ENOUGH, Jason’s demon only leaks out through small physical aggressions at inanimate objects.
Increasingly, I do not want to talk myself off the ledge —
— the ledge off which I might spread my terrible, awesome dragon wings against the burning sky and fly, casting my huge, dark shadow over the land as I soar. I don’t want to pretend the tv noise doesn’t bother me. I don’t want to take deep Buddhist breaths and find my fucking center. I don’t want to try so hard. I don’t want to put up with this shit anymore and try to be rational all the goddamned time.
I’m mad as hell, and I do not actually want to take it anymore. Will I? Will I leap, fly, burn it all down, let go and give way to the part of me that is righteous predator? And if I do, what will be left when I’m done? Will it have been worth it? Will I even KNOW?
I’m pretty sure the answer to all of those non-rhetorical questions is NO. I will not do any of those things, and it will not have been worth it, and I wouldn’t even know anyway.
Where is the balance?
Where it the middle way between, and encompassing both, the Buddha and the dragon? This one is also not rhetorical, but I don’t have an answer. That’s where the exploration lies. Shiva, destroyer of worlds so that rebirth may occur. There’s a reason that deity has always called to me.
Jason’s anger, though I hate it, is my anger, which is maybe why I hate it. Maybe I cannot tolerate its evidence in another or maybe there is only room in my psyche for the containment of my own dragon. Or perhaps my deep rooted fear of anger, of which I have only begun to free myself, still lives when it is expressed by a man. There’s an association there that I have not been able to entirely shake.
Where is the balance?
Should I even be looking for balance, or should I be letting go, giving myself over to one side or the other — the fire, the calm. What does it look like to have all of that integrated within yourself? To be merged with the worlds that contain dragons and Buddhas that don’t seem so different from one another?
I guess there’s my answer. My path forward is to follow the paths those questions carve. Explore the dragon, in me, in him, in others. To seek not answers but knowing — the kind that can’t be contained in an essay, though I won’t stop trying to do just that.
