Today, I feel tired of my own advice. I feel like I’m in the room with a very young yoga teacher who somehow believes that if I can just free my mind to accept the divine in all things, I’ll be able to arch my back a little farther, stretch my sides a little longer, plant my feet a little more firmly. But I want to say in return, “maybe the holy in me would rather say in bed, would rather not feel in balance within all four limbs, would rather not open its heart and shine.” Some days, after all, doesn’t the divine want us to feel frustrated, to feel inflexible, unspontaneous, uncreative? Some days, doesn’t God want us to lose it?

In so many peaceful philosophies, the overwhelming consternation that has always been a part of human life is simply not accounted for. Or, when it is, it’s seen as a distraction, an illusion, something to slough off, the source of our pain and a deterrent to enlightenment. We are told we need to get over these unfaithful, non-divine feelings. That we need to let go and let God.

So why, I ask, is this striking of forehead against wall so common a human experience?

Let’s say there’s a God. I’m comfortable with that supposition. Let’s also say, as the gurus of the ages tell us, that God is benevolent and kind, God is love, God is out there working for us. (If you’re a believer in the self-propagandizing The Secret, then you know that the “Universe” - a more salable word for God, the divine in all of us, Krishna, Alla, the great I-am-who-am - is basically a big Robin Williams-esque genie waiting for us to realize that all we have to do is ask for what we want and presto! The divine drive-up window.) If we suppose that God, by whatever brand-name you purchase it, wants us to be happy, and has made happiness and divinity not only available but attainable, then why does so much of human life at times feel like a stubbed toe?

This is not the paradoxical question of evil in the world. This is the question: “If our lives are meant to be divine, why doesn’t calm and serenity and wisdom come in equal measure with frustration and desire and - let’s face it - obtuse clumsiness?” I think the bone I have to pick is: are we favoring some human experiences over others? Are we shaping the divine based on what we rarely have, rather than what we know?

I am nervous as hell to go back to teaching. I want to whine about it and complain about the thanklessness of the job. And when some part of wedding planning goes awry, I want to cry or yell or tear into shreds the wickedly expensive estimate from the caterer. Now and then I want to just be a baby about things, to curl up my fists and pout and stomp around. I want these things, but the wise, non-judgmental, yoga-body me says tsk tsk before I even get a chance.

But there’s the thing. That I want to throw a tantrum or be jealous or feel resentment or tell someone off or say to someone “because I’m older and I know better, that’s why” makes me think that maybe there’s some validity to the impulse. And not just an impulse toward childish behavior, but the impulse to feel feelings that just aren’t so hot. Feelings you hide from your priest and fellow parishioners, feelings you grin through in yoga class.

What if these feelings and impulses are just exactly as divine as the happy-happy zen shoved in our faces by ten-cent gurus every day? (Something that amazes me is the willingness with which many Christians take Jesus’ own brattiness in stride. That boy could holler! But we have no trouble seeing his every action, his every step and misstep, as divinely aligned.)

So, how about a new philosophy? You are divinity. No matter what. When you eat too much, when you swear in front of children, when you can’t take your loved ones’ charming idiosyncracies any more, when you trip, when you poop, when you want to stay in bed, when your yoga shorts make your ass look big, when you don’t get your oil changed even though you know you should, when you get a speeding ticket, when you choke, when you fall. Every experience a divine experience. Every experience good and worthwhile. Even the gagging on your own good advice.

Every morning, I push myself out of bed to the sound of anxious, happy whines from the smallest dog in my pack, little dachsy-cockapoo Eliot. I groggily but carefully step down the stairs while Eliot and the middle dog, golden-yellow Rupert growl and play in the living room, waiting for me to get them - and their eldest brother, wolf-like black Max - to the back door. There, they sit and wait atop three little steps, quivering with excitement and anticipation, for me to say “okay.” Then, as if it were a new thing every time, as though Christmas has come or today is another tenth birthday party, they scamper out into the yard with smiles on their doggy faces, and set to playing.

No matter how many times we reenact this ritual, these dogs approach it with the same measure of jittery expectation and abundant joy.

Two days ago, I did something I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll regret. I accepted a teaching assignment for a class I’ve never taught before and that starts in less than a week. I have something like five days to prepare all the materials - syllabus, schedule, assignments, readings, and other media and texts - and to do whatever it might take to psych myself up to teach in the classroom, something I haven’t done for over five years. The preparation time seems a little, well, insufficient. I feel a bit as though I have guests arriving in half an hour, the house is a mess, and they’re expecting cake.

I take teaching very seriously. To me, there is no greater responsibility outside of parenting. The human mind is so easily abused or confused, but also so easily encouraged and fortified. Teachers are the other people - after parents - who manipulate growing, grasping minds. So, teaching becomes not just about imparting skills, it becomes about filling student minds (and yes, hearts) with confidence and curiosity, helping them learn how to learn - not just to pass tests and assignments - and to equip them with the tools and strategies they can use to avoid the traps - of low self-esteem, of frustration, of feelings of inferiority and incapacity - that others and they themselves lay too readily.

My friend and teaching mentor, Jesse, likes to think about teaching as though he is planning a party, bringing to the table the games and favors, and letting people play. Today, I’m thinking teaching is like my and my dogs’ morning ritual. At my “okay,” the door opens and everyone bounds into the sun, rolling about on the grass.

Planning for that, though, takes a little doing. Or does it? Matt told me yesterday it was good I have so little time to plan. There’s no time for second-guessing myself. At the same time, it means I have to do a certain amount of letting go. I have to trust the process. I have to have my own confidence, my own quivering anticipation, and I have to avoid traps I lay for myself so regularly and so well.

It’s as though I’m setting sail with twenty people aboard. I think I remember how to navigate, but I can’t be sure. And I only have a vague notion of where we’re headed. What I do know is that all of my passengers know inherently how to sail, too; in fact, they’re all experts just waiting for their chance. But I have to be careful, out there on the open seas, not to put too much pressure on them, or on myself, to reach the destination I have in mind. There are many suitable destinations, full of happy, welcoming villagers, delicious coconuts, and beautiful beaches.

As well, in my fear that we may run aground on some deserted place, or that our vessel may sink, or that some of my passengers may develop scurvy (okay, maybe that takes the metaphor too far), I don’t want to forget to point out the wonders of the sea: laughing sea lions, gypsy mermaids, and singing behemoth whales. After all, sometimes (or usually), sailing is the point, is the destination.

It feels to me like time is moving too quickly. This is August and this is Sunday. Soon, it will be January and I’ll be forty and I don’t have enough time between now and then to accomplish much of anything. Soon, it will be Monday, too. The occupations of each day seem enough to drive life forward without a destination.

I am not ready to say “forty” and to have implied in that word a life half-lived, half-done. Again, because I am nowhere near as accomplished as I’d like to be.

I am reminded of Thoreau’s deadly words, the words I first read in high school, the words that in a moment became the theme for my years after: “…to find, when I came to die, that I had not lived” (from Walden - look for paragraph 16). Thoreau is speaking of his adventures at Walden Pond, and his retreat from the bustling life that seems to shed no tear over lost time; the zombie life of forward movement without a destination besides the next meal. He strove to extricate himself from that, believing that life is lived in quieter, more intentional ways.

In high school, I read those words and an imperative settled on me: do not live only to die with regret. And, in one manner or another, that imperative has driven my choices, ruled my days; and when they could not, when circumstance kept me in a job I found unrewarding or filled my days with triviality and unintentional, unchosen activity, those words and that imperative sat on my shoulders heavily and whispered. I have felt guilty for wasting my time in fruitless pursuits. I have felt ashamed for staying in employments that were not satisfying, against my better judgment and without a choice.

I am no where near ready to say “forty.” I have spent so much of my time enlisted to urgency, debt, and duty.

There is another side to all of this, though.

In season one of the X-files, a precognitive man who can foresee people’s deaths tells FBI Agent Dana Scully that she will not die. He says to her question “How do I die?”, “You don’t.” On watching this episode with my soon-to-be husband, I decided in play to declare the same about myself. I said, “I won’t die,” as if I have this choice. Instead, I told him, I will just disappear, or be abducted by aliens, or be lifted bodily into Heaven.

Obviously, this is only a joke. But the longer I’ve held to this joke, the more it has shifted to become a fledgling philosophy. “I won’t die” seems a perfect antidote to “to find, when I came to die, that I had not lived.” Without the pressing responsibility to one day come upon death, living becomes freer, and something more easily lived with patience and tolerance. If I won’t die, then I do not need to live so carefully, walking always on the broken glass of each passing moment, fearful of the irreversible damage of any single misstep. Instead, a person who will not die knows that he will have plenty of time to walk many different paths.

For me, this is a frightening and also beautiful new philosophy. The certainty of death, and the threat of feeling one has failed when those last breaths come, have sung their fret to me every day since I turned seventeen. In a grand irony, Thoreau’s words have made regret so imminent that I have not lived the quiet, untroubled life he advocated. My urgency to live life right has prevented me from living a life of peace and appreciation.

I have occupied myself with doing everything I could, shoving in joys beside duties, and not usually giving them equal time. For the pain it’s caused, though, I am accustomed to it.

I am both anxious, and loathe, to let go of my habit of urgency.

But I should start somewhere (maybe here). There is a saying so many people use to motivate themselves: “Live as though you might die tomorrow.” (I can only imagine the catatonic state of panic I’d have suffered if I’d heard that one in high school!) I would like to alter that: Live as though you will never die. Fill up your days because you can, not because you’re about to lose them. Be gentler, less urgent. Regret nothing, for there is time for everything.

I had a dream last night that, upon waking, left me cradled in a confusion and disorientation profound enough that I had to tick off the pieces of my life like reciting the alphabet to put my mind in order again.

It was a simple enough dream: I lived with my spouse - both male and female in the dream - in a small house by the ocean. Our home overlooked the sea, being perched on a high cliff wall. Below us, on the beach, there was a cove that at night filled nearly to the edges with the high tide and with moon light. On occasion, we went walking there, my spouse and I, splashing our feet between the sand and the sea.

In this dream, I slept and had a dream. I dreamed there was a woman in the water in this cove. She lay flat in the waves, drifting with them as one who is asleep and as one who breathes. There was a respiration in her movement back and forth. But slowly, her hands, resting on the surface of the water, began to strike at that surface, and she moaned. She stood, and the water came up with her, as would a heavy wet fabric. She pulled at it all around her and it pulled up - the waves themselves pulled up in her hands like heavy wet fabric - and the water clung to her around her shoulders and waist as a dress.

And she moaned: “I have the ocean as my dress.” “I have the ocean as my dress.”

Her mournfulness was countervailed only by the exquisiteness of her situation. She was as lovely as she was tragic. As beautiful as she was imprisoned.

In my dream, I awoke from the dream about the woman in the cove and cried. I cried for the sadness of her plight, for the sublimity of her grace, and for the perfection of her melancholy. I sat up from bed and paced about the room until my spouse came to comfort me.

And then I woke. Not by the sea. Not in that other house. Here, in Denver, with the cherry tree outside my bedroom window and the dogs watching me for signs of the journey I’d been on while I slept.

They say that dreaming within a dream draws you closer to your spirit self, your energy body, your Krishna, your Holy Spirit. They say the number of layers to your dreams has some correlation to the number of your incarnations. I’ve had dreams within dreams, and dreams within dreams within dreams. If the dreaming I had a dream is meant to be profound, then perhaps that is why I was disoriented.

But in truth, I believe my disorientation arose from the plight of the woman with the ocean for her dress. Was this the feminine, I want to ask? The feminine principle, the yin, is bound closely with the waters of the sea, the origin of all species. It is the nurturing force and the creative force.

But the woman in my dream was not nurturing anyone; she was creating nothing; nor was she the ocean itself. Instead, she pulled at the heavy brocade of waves around her body, wishing in her moaning, that she could free herself from them. So, did I dream some manifestation of the feminine, or was this beautiful sprite something else?

I want to say she was my sister self; my tormented feminine, my wounded imagination, my melancholy. And her suffering and her exquisiteness was a beacon-light to show me the way to art and fascination. But saying so sounds unfortunately sentimental and romantic, and I remind myself of some young college poet seeking his muse in the wild imaginings of his slumbering.

I think, most of all, she reminded me of a thing out of medieval legend; a new Lady of Shalott. Ghostly as a fairy, elemental as the women of Celtic legend, my lady with the ocean for her dress speaks to a deep mythology in me. She tells me the creative act is always as bewitching as it is vexing, as inevitable as it is reluctant. The muse has within her the ocean - all its variety and plenty, all its storms and moon light - and yet she is imprisoned by all she is able to create. Profoundly divine, utterly visceral, perfectly melancholy.

Start from the beginning. This is the advice my mother gives me. But, I think, where is the beginning? I’ve come so far from there, I don’t remember it. I immediately think about the short stories I’ve written - the “good” short stories - and about how I made them. How do they sound? What voice did I use? Where did those ideas come from? Because maybe those were good ideas; and maybe I should write more work that is like that - with similar narratives, characters with desires and problems like those. Maybe that will get me going the direction I want to go. Maybe that will put me square in the middle of the literary life I think or wish I should be living by now.

Or maybe that’s resting on my laurels?

I once told my students that “writing is an aching occupation.” Oh, what writing has done to me.

The problem is (or the problem that pops up out of what feels like a sea of complication) that I think I should be somewhere by now that I am not. Square in the middle of a literary life. I should have my PhD now, and I should have short stories published, and I should have my tenure-track writing professorship, and I should have a book out. I should not be where I am: in an adjunct job with one recycled manuscript and some dozen short stories panting from the exhaustion of their overuse, their keeping me company for this eight years or more. I should not be almost forty and still confused about what a novel is, what I should be writing about, whether or not I’m a literary author, whether or not I’m still intrigued enough by magical realism to consider it my genre (or should I write for a popular audience?). I should not be here, scratching down my thoughts in a new notebook (I’ve forgotten how the hands can cramp) hoping to hit on that one technique that will assure that I can get on with the literary life to which I feel I am a deserving, if dispirited, heir.

I should not be staring back in time and trying to find what I was that wrote before. I should not be, in short, back at the beginning.

No one wants to be here. Not after all the years of trying to move away from it. And yet I know the lessons I’ve taught my own students, I hear my own voice speaking the words: “Writing is always inventing. It’s always new; it’s never expected. And writing - the act, the faith it is - usually knows best. Trust the process.”

So, this is the process? Is there no magical step I can take to erase the years of trying that have not got me what I thought they would? Is the only step I can take to start again? No rewind, no catch up? Just the pretending that I’m starting fresh?

It’s impossible to start fresh, of course; my life is a testament to the choices I’ve made since I began. I cannot erase relationships, my home, my dogs, the years spent on a single book (that mercilessly refuses to yield). I am almost forty. I am not thirty-two, or twenty four. I have the pillars of my responsibilities and the cushions of my joys to define my space.

But still, somehow, back to the beginning I must go. Patiently, with faith, more prodigal than prodigy, and maybe a little bit penitent? (Penitent, yes, because I cannot release the sense that I have failed my promise - the promise I am, and the promise I’ve made to that potential. I have not been as sweet and loving to my words and excitement and imagination as I should have been.)

Prodigal, then. As in the story. Will my neglected inspiration be as forgiving as the father in that story? I can do nothing but begin the trek home to find out.

(… hey… my hand didn’t cramp so bad after all…)