In my Dreams

Dreams pass into the reality of actions. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

-Anais Nin

Last night I dreamt I was aboard a war ship. It was early morning and misty. I was silently witnessing two military men manning a missile launcher. One man ordered the other to load the missiles. The other man loaded them with trepidation. "Don't you think of the children?" he asked the other man. "No," he replied, " you can't think of the children." 

I woke up this morning sick to my stomach. There is nothing I would fight for except maybe to end fighting. This dream had started last night, influenced by an Anthony Bourdain tv show the Old Man and I were watching. It was about Namibia and I was struck by the starkness of the landscape, the eking out of an existence, the brutal history. 

One tribe lived a very poor existence with only one plant as it's sustenance. It made incredibly use of this one plant, making inventively varied dishes from its parts. It made me embarrassed at the riches I possessed in my refrigerator. How we are so lucky to have the food we have here, the richness, the luxury of being "foodies." The luxury of having to go on a diet. 

Bourdain mentioned, as he blithely sand boarded down a dune, that this was the land from which apartheid leaders collected, kidnapped, their mercenaries. It made me think of the terror of being terrorized by mercenaries, and of how terrorized the mercenaries might have been to be terrorizing. The two sides to a dismal story. 

I am truly amazed that after millennia of evolution, human beings still solve their disputes the same way they did when they first learned to stand. Can't we think of a better way? Why is war always the common denominator?