bracelet

a couple nights ago i dreamt that i was walking along a street or a path or a trail and came across a kid, about 10 or 12 years old, either male, female, or both at once, and I gave them my spiritual vanity bracelet, without their asking.

they looked it over and thought the hebrew letters were "cool' and asked what they meant. i told them that i couldn't tell them, they'd have to find out for themselves.

in waking life, i don't wear my spiritual vanity bracelet any more. i carry it with me each day, and the day i had that dream i wore it. but not the day before, and not the day after. to the extent that i was ever on a spiritual journey -- to the extent that i was ever on one any more than any other person ever is -- i have strayed. i have become sidetracked, lost focus.

i read a poignant blog posting the other day, where someone commented that the aging process is a sharpening of focus. in youth, we have a wide focus that narrows each year until we reach our 80s, when our entire world is a little tiny dot of sharp focus.

i'm still too young, it seems, to maintain the kind of focus i had not so long ago. and when i reach 80, what will i have to see in my narrow world-field? Not much, perhaps.

my real-life spiritual vanity bracelet, the one that i still have, was dipped in the pacific shortly after it was made, and again when it was remade, and again and again and once on my wedding day. it swam in the ocean on the beach that i thought was a holy place, but it is just a beach. it was my friend when i was lonely, and it spoke to me when i needed to hear. a while ago, i was drawn there. now, not so much.

i keep it in my pocket, i think, because looking at it reminds me of what an important thing it used to represent for me, of what an important message i made it to whisper to me, whenever i saw it, or felt it, or thought of it. it reminds me now of how unfaithful i've been to my own direction.

but direction is such a fickle thing. a wise man once said, only the insane and the dead are completely sure. longer than my spiritual vanity bracelet, doubt and skepticism have been my companions. whether my "journey" ever had merit was, and remains, unclear.

the spiritual vanity bracelet says "know before whom you stand". it is an exhortation, and a riddle. i have not done it, and like the child in my dream, i do not even know what it means. maybe i will resume my search. or maybe i will continue it, uninterrupted after all, in my own particular... idiom.