We'll need to see your ticket stub.
I am at a far wall seat at a movie theater, sitting across from my daughter. The movie suddenly stops as there is a fire evacuation—we are all demanded out. The theater is huge and packed with people. I am having difficulty finding my moccasins under the seat and am trying to gather all. I finally am one of the last ones making it to the lobby, but am sent back in when I can’t locate my ticket stub as that is how they are accounting for people in the lobby. I am told it doesn’t matter what my name is, they’ve only got the ticket-generated numbers on file.
I am the very last one out and this happens twice, me being sent back in to try and find this missing ticket. The building is on fire and these authorities won’t count me, let me exit without a silly stub of lost paper—a formality to name myself. Forced to search for abandoned receipt that proves my life exists? But, in the meantime, there is supposed threat of burning if I’m unable to find it, but I see, nor hear, nor smell any fire, and in my mind it seems just an amped up drill. But, everyone else is acting and behaving as if it’s real. I find myself that last patron in the theater with two guards sent in to sweep for humans while they make their final count.
As I wake, I consider the above scenario, ask myself how will I honor the message—a gift from the great detective work of dreaming? I scribble down in my journal:
Remember that sometimes I am the only one to see/detect a lie and that is how I’ve always been. A gift my mother helped to grow with her foreignness in Utah, her not having a traditional job, her midwifery, the weekly vocabulary tests she forced us to take and her magazine subscriptions. I have always been very quick at hidden pictures, at spatial perception—tell us what shape this unfolded box is once folded again—and reading comprehension, or relational reading between the lines.
Probably why I hate crossword puzzles or word finds, there’s no point—just find to find. They solve or do nothing. Not for good, but vanity, how many books have you read? How many operas have you memorized? For, if intelligence, is piled too high can it not block spiritual sight.
Photo collage is my own, titled, "Wolf Me."
