Dream Walking the Road

It came to me years ago, pronounced in a dream like second language vocabulary. It turned over and over in mind, syllables tumbling slowly into place. The setting I cannot recollect, but the locale was foreign. Maybe I sat crossed-legged in a smoky, gold-laced den, rāga' tableau pulsing the air alongside the beckoning drone of a sitar. Maybe not. I do know I got to my feet to receive it: a dream-word hovering opaque, intangible; and a rich voice: your path, it said. Vengarahala.

Did you mean: vinegar hilal? asks Google? Venkatachala? offers Wikipedia. I've not fully investigated the permutations, but of our esteemed body of knowledge I have deduced that damn little supports my unique understanding of the word. I was either bestowed this word or in some way I chose it. Whatever the origin, the passive/active nature of vengarahala finds me pondering its significance today, nearly two decades later.

Life is different, now. And now. In June of 2010 I stopped consuming alcohol, and a month later I graduated with my Goddard MFA: two consecutive steps away from a passive condition into an active one. Since then, the energy I'd been channeling into a manuscript far too small for its weight has found new direction in short stories such as "Sanctum," graciously included in Soul's Road. Stories arising or informed by dreams. And as they come forward, so the road unrolls.* My late father, ragged boy-man, appears on the shoulder of one recent dream road. Scrawled on his board in what must have drained the cartridge of a ballpoint (his last?): any-freakin-place.

So, toward being a better writer, dreaming is a big part of my walk. If I haven't at some point experienced in a dream the emotional current of a story or poem, it won't often have the sea-legs or guts for revision. My characters are my subjects and, as Bob Dylan said of his own, all versions of myself on their own paths, doomed or otherwise.

Something else I've been carrying around a few years: El camino se hace al andar.

John Schimmel on Soul's Road

The photograph is of the road and parade ground that runs down the middle of Washington State's Fort Worden, the west coast campus of Goddard College's low residency MFA Creative Writing program.   Behind the camera is the row of pre-WWI officers' houses students live in during the residencies.  That road was sort of the Soul's Road for me.  There was the city bus that passed by in a strange near-silence that always put me in mind of the train that ran through the water in the film SPIRITED AWAY.  A totally apt reminder since I always thought Fort Worden was probably haunted and certainly some sort of a spiritual nexus. For my second residency I had a room with a view of the Admiralty Inlet and a fireplace.  I developed a routine that lasted for the rest of my residencies:  I would get up early, make my own breakfast and bring it to my room, write for an hour, spend the day at workshops and master classes and readings and in the commune of writers in the "Servery," then come back for a cup of tea and a fire and another hour of writing.  There was something about traveling back and forth across that road and then the parade ground that had about it a Hogwarts air, like we were traversing some great divide into a magical world to learn to be wizards and draw out our own souls for examination and, on good days, healing.