5:20 A.M. Open your eyes. Alarm buzzing. Snap into consciousness. To your left: the rise of your husband's back, a twist of sheets over the scaffold of his shoulders. Morning light mosaics gray over your bedroom's white walls. Reach out your right hand, let your fingers smooth over a stack of books, the base of a reading lamp, the cord to a clock radio. Finally, a snooze button. Silence, but for the rush of your breath and the roar of your heartbeat.
Clump downstairs, put on the kettle, let out the dog, clear the dishes from the drainer and wipe down the table. As you do, the kitchen blurs and your heart beats a staccato in your chest. Sit down at the kitchen table with a cup of milky coffee, the newspaper spread before you. These bits of morning bring you back to yourself. Your head and heart begin to decelerate, just a little.
See the shrink. "How are your mornings?" she asks. Look to the right, out the window. The overcast sky reminds you of the lonely, spider web-white fog of the San Francisco sky of your childhood.
Answer. "The same. Anxious and sweaty, as if I were back on that floor in Berkeley."
Turn your gaze back to the window for a moment. "I had another dream about the Baal Shem Tov," you say as a tear trails down your cheek.
The dream: Early 1700s. The Baal Shem Tov, whose given name was Yisroel, is a hollow-cheeked and spindly-limbed teenager in a cheder in a small Ukrainian village. A rabbi paces at the front of the cheder, lecturing. Yisroel's restless. Leg jiggling under the table, left elbow jerking randomly. The rabbi drones on and the boy's gaze turns away. Despite April's faint yellow sun, he sees ice blooms on the sill. Glistening frozen crystals cling to the pine tree just outside. A sparrow lights on a bough. "Yisroel! Yisroel!" The boy angles his head towards the sound. The rabbi towers over him, expecting an answer. The boy pushes away from the table, runs out the door.
Pine needles and mud hug the bottom of Yisroel's shoes as they crunch through thin layers of ice along the path from the cheder to the forest at the edge of the village. He pumps his legs, he's breathing fast. The pines grow taller and denser, shadowing the path. It's early afternoon but dark like dusk. Suddenly, a clearing. Bright sunlight illuminates an expanse of yellow-green meadow. Panting, Yisroel drops to his knees in the soft green, looks up at the blue of the wide open sky and exhales. He is home.
Research. The Baal Shem Tov, unlike the other rabbis of his time, professed that there is divinity inherent in all living beings and encouraged a simpler, peeled back connection with nature. He believed that the world is not two things - God and his creations - but one thing: God and creations together, each creation animated by one of God's sparks, each creation endowed by God with specific traits. It is our mandate to live according to our true, God given natures. A cypress tree should not strive to be a sycamore. A housefly should not yearn to be a honeybee. The Baal Shem Tov taught that God's mandate is to return to one's true nature.
Go through your memory files. Find yourself as a four-year-old, in the still dark living room in your flat in San Francisco. Look at shelves laden with gilt-colored books, all lined up like soldiers. The name on the books' spines is G U R D J I E F F, and although you don't understand this word, you know there's a secret in these books. Pull out a volume from the middle of the shelf, sit down Indian-style on the cold, wood floor and page through the books until daylight.
Remember the sixties. The smothering suburbs of St. Louis, teased updos and mahjong: your parents' home. They leave for San Francisco's promise of freedom. Once on the West Coast they revel. But it's too much. The restless motor in your mother's mind spins out. She is all bristle, all high voltage current, all stop that, you're making me nervous. She takes you away. Get in the car now, we're leaving! You are five, and you leave your father, your flat, the Humpty-Dumpty on the floor of your bedroom. The car stops and you both get out and walk into a house. Just like that your mother disappears. You are in a house with strangers, a pod of Berkeley's stringy-haired hippies. That night lie on that floor, feel a dense area deep in your chest, a bar of hot metal. Your ribs are locked, arms tingle, and every creak and footfall freezes you in place. Try to catch your breath. Warmth shivers through, and your mother's current is now yours. Look into the black and see that the ceiling has melted into the nighttime sky. The stars swirl, have a voltage of their own. They are about to reach down and yank you up off the floor and take you with them into outer space.
Remember the seventies. The flower children of the sixties stop dropping acid and turn to other modes of self-exploration. Transcendental Meditation. Scientology. EST. Gurdjieff's acolytes turn their attention from the Armenian philosopher to Subud, a group based in Indonesia. They search for their authentic selves, want to toss their masks into the air like Mary Tyler Moore's beret.
Watch your father groom his new toupee, readying himself for a Subud meeting. The Berkeley gang is still smoking weed, doing peyote, and your mother is now in the locked ward. She loses her quest for self-actualization down the bottom of a two-inch tall honey-colored vial of mind-numbing Thorazine.
Take a closer look: the annual Subud picnic in Golden Gate Park. Your mother, on temporary leave from the hospital, sits on a park bench, her unbuttoned pea coat draped over her slumped shoulders. She stares into nothing, eyes cloudy, like an aquarium.
Ask, "Mom?"
Remember more. Your father leaves for the week long initiation at the Primal Scream Institute. When the week is over, he comes home, but disappears every night after dinner down the basement steps with an assistant from the Institute. Knocks and thuds from the padded Primal Scream box in your basement make your chest contract. Struggle to inhale. Despite the staticky buzz in your ears, try to sleep.
Read more. Threaded throughout cultures is a belief that each one of us must work to bring him or herself back to his or her true nature. It's called Zen, Hasidism, or sixties counterculture, but it all boils down to the same thing—that the task at hand is to not allow thoughts and emotions to be based on what happened in the past, but bring them back into the present.
Believe. Underneath impossible tangles of fear and worry, you know your pure nature—like the cypress tree's cypressness and the housefly's houseflyness—is lying in wait, aching to be released.
Look out your window. See the new spring leaves and remember Yisroel's forest clearing, spacious and luminous. Your mornings may time-travel, but under the thrum of your heartbeat you know there is also an open green space, and in that meadow, the possibilities are infinite.