Heart Time

This past Monday, I awoke with a start at 3 a.m.  I’d had a terrifying nightmare.  The fact that I’d had a nightmare made no sense to me; I hadn’t been watching or reading anything frightening before bed, nor had I eaten anything out of the ordinary, that I could recall.  And actually, I’d gone to bed in a really great mood.  How on earth, I thought, had my psyche suddenly manifested a nightmare?

I walked around Monday like a stunned deer.  I felt unearthed, disoriented–altered–by my dream. And the more I re-visited its images and feelings, the more I realized that the nightmare had felt bigger than me.  The nightmare had felt as though I was a woman being sold into sex-trafficking, that I was all women being sold into sex-trafficking.  And I carried all of them with me into the day Monday, against my will.

That was when I logged onto Google news and found out: Monday was National Anti-Trafficking Awareness Day.

My nightmare no longer surprised me.

I’ve heard many women refer to 3 a.m. as “heart time”.  That if you have a vivid dream and/or wake up at that time, it’s your heart speaking its deepest prayers. Waking me at 3 a.m., my heart already knew what the day was about.  Putting me in solidarity–through image, sound, and emotion–with the millions still captured in sex trafficking, my dreams had already started praying for me, before the day had even begun.

I’d never really experienced “heart time” before.  I wondered if I’d experience it again.

Monday night came, and there were no nightmares, thankfully.  I didn’t wake at 3 a.m.

But Tuesday morning, I couldn’t quite shake a feeling: a dull dread, a hopelessness, a fatigue, a loss.

That was when I logged onto Google news and found out.

Haiti…

Why my heart didn’t wake me up again I don’t know.  I wish it had.  I wish I could have gone through a nightmare for each and every one.  I wish I could have prayed it away through my dreams.  I wish I could have reversed time.  Raised the dead.  Helped re-build every morsel of  their precious lives.  But I couldn’t. “Heart time”, I discovered, had terrible terrible limits.

These past two days, it’s felt as if the whole world is grieving.  You can feel it in the air; the grief wraps around you in the still in-between-the-rush moments, and you immediately feel guilty for your privilege of rushing, your privilege of forgetting for awhile.  Everyone’s trying their best to make sense of it, to help, to pray, to spread the word, to give.  So many “donate to this, donate to that” and wishing you could donate to everything.  So many phone numbers and death toll numbers, simultaneously.  What else can we do?  What else?

I can blog.  I can pray.  I can donate money, supplies, time.  I can contact friends who have loved ones in Haiti, and try–but probably fail–to give them comfort.  I can scream.  I can cry.  I can hate Pat Robertson and everything he stands for.  But what else?  What else?

Tonight, I knew “what else”.  I knew–and know–that when I’m in the throes of a “what else?”, if I’m to be of good to anyone in righting a wrong,  I need to first re-ground my soul. To do that, I turn to the wisdom of a very special spiritual teacher.  Tonight, I gathered some crayons and colored a mandala while I re-visited my teacher’s story.  I put “Happy-Go-Lucky” into the DVD player.

“Happy-Go-Lucky” is my second favorite movie of all time (“Stranger Than Fiction” being the first).  ”Happy-Go-Lucky” is not only a great film, but it’s also–I believe–alchemical.  It changes the person watching it, and they, in turn, change everyone around them, and on and on and on.  Its agency?  Joy.  Pure, un-adulterated, healing joy.  ”Happy-Go-Lucky” is about a clinically cheerful woman named Poppy.  No matter what happens to her–and in the film a lot happens to her–she faces it all with a grin and a giggle and a joyful spirit.

It’s very easy, at the start of the film, to dismiss Poppy as an “ignorance is bliss” flake, a woman who is cheerful only because she’s unaware of the world: she’s rendered herself ”comfortably numb”.  But as the film progresses, one discovers that Poppy is anything but.  Not only is she aware of the world, she’s more aware than most.  Her heartbreak and her anger at the injustices of the world run just as deep in her as her joy.  In fact, her anger and her joy are inseparable; they are the double-edged sword of love that she uses for good.  She works for good, every day, with her kindness, her generosity, and her advocacy towards and for those around her; and a resolve to always, always, spread joy.  And without giving away the plot of the film…her joy works its alchemy.  On a lot of people.  On me.

Poppy, to me, is a Christ figure, a laughing Buddha, the playful Vishnu, the wise Sophia, the healing Mary.  Re-watching Poppy’s story is obviously entertaining, but more than that–it grows my soul.  The film is a giggling meditation.

No surprise to me, as I watched the film, my mandala began to take on the quirky color palatte of Poppy’s wardrobe.  My soul released, rejuvenated, rested, re-charged for action.  By the film’s end, the mandala winked at me, and I grinned, blissfully happy; still connected to my rage, my grief, the prayers of my “heart time”, with a clear-headed determination to do the next best thing I could do to help.  And a clear determination to always, always, give joy.  And send love.

I turned off the film, smiled through my sadness, and prayed, and hoped that–in as much as Poppy had helped me find my joy again–that the joy could ripple outward in love beams, straight out of my heart and through my bedroom window, out onto the street and every street, up into the air and across every ocean, and wrap itself around those mourning in slave-captivity, those mourning in Haiti, healing every broken place of despair, giving all the freedom and comfort I desperately wish I could give.

[images courtesy of Google]

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