Chasing Rainbows

There are times when music has been the only thing between me and chronic bleakness. This morning, when being 72 seemed older and farther along than I allow it to be, I needed to hear a song of hope. I needed it to fetch me from my thoughts and bring the rush of happiness that music brings. At a vintage music blog, the writer talked about some black string band records from the late 1920s that he found the best of their genre. One of these groups was the Dallas String Band and one of the recordings the blogger posted was "Chasin' Rainbows." The song was both a rescue and a revelation because it helped me understand a dream I had last night about my guru, Bawa Muhiayaddeen. 

In my dream, Bawa asked me to write 10 questions of pressing, personal importance on a sheet of paper and keep them to myself. When I was done writing them in my undecipherable scrawl, I told him I was finished. He then held up a sheet of paper with 10 question written on it that were identical in content and handwriting to my own. Not only that but he had a printed version passed to me to verify the questions. Of course, I was amazed. I asked him, "How did you do that?" He looked at me with disgust. "Isn't this what you wanted as proof of my power?" he asked. I was stymied. I wanted to say no but he was right. Mind-reading was, to me, a legitimate verification of his powers.

"Okay," Bawa continued, "now that I have established my authority with you, pick the one question that you need answered more than any other." I blurted it out just as written on the page: "What do I do after I dispense with God?" Bawa looked at me as sternly as he ever has. "Do you expect me to answer that question?" "Yes," I said, "or give me a clue." "David, stop asking, 'What's next?' and start asking, 'What now?' If God isn't the next thing or the thing that you need, what is? That's the question." When I awoke, with firefly-like flashes of light in the room, I added, "And that's the answer." 

Now you would think after a dream like that I would dance for joy. But atheism is not a joyful practice yet because it demands what Monique calls "acceptance of Nothing and the freedom it brings."  Mo and I watched an interview with director Ingmar Bergman last night during which he said, "I'm done with God. I know there is nothing outside me." Mo nodded yes, but looked as if Bergman was far from making peace with that answer. I knew what she meant. Bergman only wishes it were true, I thought, because such a truth is as final as it is absolute. Or as Mo put it yesterday, "Believing in Nothing takes courage." Until then, keep following the rainbow.