The meaning of life

I have an unusual gift for which I am very grateful. I am sometimes able to converse with loved ones who have died, in rich and highly realistic dreams.

I have been very fortunate to feel the genuine presence of several of my own dearly departed friends and family in this way. These dreams inevitably move me very deeply, and always leave me with a sense of imparted wisdom and profound peace.

I had one of these dreams this past Saturday morning, just before waking, and it was the most profound yet. Someone quite close to me, who died not long ago, told me in this dream something I had been seeking for as long as I could remember.

Simply put, she told me the meaning of life. Not in so many words, but in terms that were as clear and as plain as the world I awoke in. This was the message of the dream, and I hope I may never forget it:

"The meaning of life is to live."

The meaning of life is to live. How simple, and how sublime. What a priceless treasure. What a timeless truth.

I hope and pray that I may repeat it and learn it and know it and love it for all of my natural days and then some.

The meaning of life is to live.

I can live with that.

I must make a grave confession

I confess that I am no longer at home in my skin. I confess that I fear I have let my talent dwindle for the sake of material concerns. I confess that what I have achieved is a tiny slice of what I have conceived. I confess that I am unable to discern what matters from what simply pours out of me. I confess that I thought myself so much better than all of this. I confess that I hardly thought I'd get this far. I confess that I fear I may never get any further.

I have striven to live as a normal man in a normal world for some years now. I have endeavoured to find peace with that. But there is no peace for me. Truly.

Blood boils in my veins. Fire leaps in my heart. You may know me as a loud, rude Ontario joker with a love for trains and trees. I guess that's what I am. But I play the guitar because my soul feels like a hurricane. I write songs because my mind is a maelstrom. My mouth moves, in words in songs in stammers in shouts because I am a puppet of every god and demon that would speak in earthly tones.

My mother and father raised a good modest churchboy with a flair for conversation and some rather odd predilections. At age 17 I turned myself out of the house and started turning myself into someone, possibly my true self, by wandering around the world like an innocent fool.

Is this the result? I see before me now a thirty-something middle class boob with a soft belly and bags under his eyes, stiff fingers that will never find virtuosity, choked words that would have raged the hypocrites out of the land if I could only have spoken them, bent at the shoulders by the weight of a mediocre life that most folks would call pretty good. What a travesty.

I have not delivered my essential message: that to live as oneself, and then beyond oneself, might be a divine thing. I don't even know if it's true. I have not found my real place, I have not offered a real vision.

I haven't even taken my new CD to the factory.

I work in a factory where they make television programs.

I hate factories. Factories were the death of craft, and art will be next.

I feel unworthy to say the word "art" out loud.

I must make a grave confession. I have wasted a lot of precious time on this pathetically short journey to the grave.