A Precipitous Plunge

I awoke from a powerful dream Saturday morning.

I had been on a long journey, accompanied much of the time by many people, among them a very special woman, and near the end I boarded a bus full of people whose faces I could not see, and I got off on a high stone bridge, overlooking a pond far below. Then I seemed to be riding in a pushcart or something, but as I crossed the bridge I was suddenly pushed in the cart over the edge to the pond far below.

Immediately, I freed myself from the cart and prepared myself to hit the water. I knifed deep into the pond, afraid I would smash into the bottom, and just as skulls and bones on the floor of the pond came into view I finally stopped plunging, reversed, and headed towards the surface. As I did that I became aware that the water was as greasy as a soul food kitchen sink.

I burst back into the air dripping with oil.

At the side of the pond was a high wall of boulders like those of a jetty at the seashore, and I swiftly climbed them back to the top. There I met my oldest brother, or someone like him in a wheelchair, and he gave me something odd - it was a square, shallow box with what looked like a tongue stretched out and caught in a mousetrap, and then he pointed me ahead, across another walkway, and told me to follow that down along the river.

As I mulled it over later on, I kept trying to recall the woman, and I could remember dreaming of her before, of her lush breasts and warm embrace and making love to her several times, of loving her and not wanting to leave her, but as in the dream, I was swept along in the tide of humanity down the old cobbled streets.



Years ago, my heart wrote a poem that said,

All desires rise and fall;
At the low ebb of desire
the ocean waits;
The current pushes outward,
attachments fall.

Life sweeps us away, sooner or later, from the things we love. But it doesn't have to drown or diminish us, not if we struggle for the light, for reason, for purpose, and not if we have the humility to listen, to be gently guided by the friends and other currents in our lives.

I face a gentle denouement as events surrounding ERHC Energy come to an inevitable turning point. Soon we will know what we have won, if we have won. We will see where this fierce and loving journey of change and challenge will leave us.

In a few days, like many of my fellow travelers whoses faces I can only know from their hastily written words and comments here and on the message boards, I will likely disembark at a high, distant place and head for a new one. That is the way the current is pushing me, and I would be a fool not to let it do so.

All good things come to an end, do they not? And so will come an end, high or low, to my journey with ERHC.

Through coups and catastrophes, through peaks and plunges and valleys and plains, we have traveled a path through a world new to us, and arrived in a far, far safer place than the one we left.

As we part, a few days or weeks or months from now, I will remember many people fondly, for small favors and fine compliments, and have bad memories of just one or two - and even those I will forgive and forget, because doing otherwise would only slow my journey.

I have far to go, and much to do, and I will always miss you, all of you, very much. Thank you for sharing this perilous and very promising journey with me.