33 Floors

Today is New Year's Day, and one of the significant rites in our modern urban mythology. While drinking the old year out and the new year in might be the less productive of our rituals surrounding this turn of the modern wheel of the year, there is a lot of good vibration centered around the event as well. New Year's Resolutions are often the butt of jokes this time of year, but a lot of positive thinking happens at this time in the spirit of self renewal and transformation. Even if the follow through isn't always there and the "real world" bogs us down more often than not, the energies raised in the spirit of new beginnings is palpable and positive and shouldn't be brushed off as juvenile, overly idealistic, or pointless as easily as they are sometimes. 

For me, the turn of the year is always a little different because my birthday falls so close to it. In 11 more days I will have survived another year. That's always an achievement. This year I survived major surgery and four different tiny airplanes. Who knows what the next year could have in store. I am feeding off the positive energies generated by the new year this year (and they seem to be slightly higher this year than others to me but that could be simply because I'm paying attention) to try and override a pretty irrational fear that keeps creeping up in the back of my mind. A friend of mine had a dream once. In this dream she saw me standing on top of a building with 33 floors. That seems like a pretty specific number to dream about. I was 30 at the time she had the dream and told me about it. I've never been able to forget it. That niggly and paranoid part of my brain of course wants to say that means that this is it. I have 33 years to live. I've reached the top of my building and I'm done. As this friend has a penchant for dreams that are a little something more, that niggly bit has latched onto this idea with all the tiny pinpricks of its being. 

As the day approaches, though, I'm determined to turn that little niggly voice around. That dream doesn't have to mean that I'm fated to live only 33 years, physically. Dreams are like that. What if the dream means that this is the year that I transform. What if that dream means that this is the year I reach the top in a much more positive light. I've climbed up all those flights of stairs (or maybe I took the elevator) and now I'm on the roof. The stars are shining above me. I am there. I am at the top. There is nothing between me and the sky. 

I haven't asked my friend, recently, what she thinks this dreams means. I don't know if I ever well. I think she knows that it scares me even though that was absolutely not her intent in telling me. Maybe she could give me some insight and maybe not. Like I said, I'm not going to ask. I'm not going to rely on someone else's instinct here. I am going to make this dream into what I want it to be, and maybe that's the whole point anyway.

A dream is just a dream, right? Or it isn't. It doesn't matter. This dream is not going to be my Croak Dream. There was no Cosmic Owl (though there was an otter, but I'd been talking about them at lot at the time.) This dream is what I make of it, and right now, on the last few steps before that final floor, I'm going to look at it as a positive force. I come out of my 33rd year on the rooftop, out from the confines of the concrete and ruckus that is every day life. I am there, closer to the stars than I have ever been. My purpose does not lie in the mundane of the building but the vastness of the sky. It's time to move from one cycle to another and that cycle doesn't have to be physical. This year I am going to find my bliss. I am going to pursue it. I am going to leave those stairs I've been trudging up in that dark and winding stairwell and go out onto the roof to look out on the world all around and see it, finally, from a higher view. 

The time has come to stop mucking about and engage.