I Will Guide You

“You are afflicted by emptiness, my love. Emptiness where Asaf and Hani once were. But if you write about them, you will fill in the empty space with their beating hearts. You will be together again. Souls live on in stories…” ~Nomi Eve, The Henna House

Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

Over the years since their passing, I have experienced a recurring dream in which my beloved Uncle Ron and Aunt Sue appear. While the dream varies a bit in structure, I am always either walking or pedaling a ten-speed bicycle, headed to their country home, looking for them. Just like when I was a kid in the back seat of the family sedan, it always feels like the longest journey to get to their house. Over highways, down gravel roads, on overgrown paths with massive trees on either side I walk or pedal on and on over hills full of stubborn will to make it to their house. When I finally arrive, I rarely go inside. I am not sure why I don’t go in. I long to step inside and find them, but I stay outside most times. If I do open their front door, I search through the house from the kitchen to the back deck again and again only to discover they are not home. Even though I don’t find them there, I still feel solace washing over me both in the dream and upon awakening.

Since I was seventeen, I have longed to write. I have known in my bones my purpose is to write. But fear gets in the way of things we are meant to do sometimes. With these first dreams of Ron and Sue, I knew their story was aching to be written. But how? Was it my story to tell? Would I offend my parents by setting forth the bold truth that these two people were more important in my foundation than they had been? How would I fit in writing a book while holding down a career and with a growing family? Questions and doubt and fear held me captive. But still their story kept surfacing as a possibility. Little bits and pieces of memories of them ebbed and flowed in my thoughts.

Snug in my bed one night in my forties, I was tossing these bits and pieces around in my mind one before falling asleep and dreaming again of journeying to their home. Only this time, Aunt Sue met me on the highway at the junction to the county road that leads to the gravel road that winds up the hill to their house. She had been there at junction on the highway, just waiting for me to show up. She looked at me with her dark, sparkling eyes, full of kindness through her black, cat eyeglasses and said simply, “I will guide you”. She turned quickly to her baby blue beachcomber bicycle, hopped on it, and away she pedaled. And I followed her. Neither of us spoke beyond the four words she said before hopping on her bicycle. I felt at peace knowing she would show me the way and pedaled along, watching her pedal in front of me with her dark hair peeking out from under a red bandana, blowing in the wind. We did not reach the house before I woke up. But when I did awaken, I again felt at peace, and I knew this story was mine to write.

While I have made some progress on this story, in truth, I have also allowed it to languish over the past decade as fear and resistance prevailed, and I put the story away and quit writing multiple times only to resurrect it repeatedly as this story continues to haunt my thoughts, Ron and Sue continue to show up in my dreams, and my soul yearns to write.

I believe that I am meant to write and that this is the story I am to tell first and foremost. The universe is speaking. Thomas Moore writes in A Religion of One’s Own about dreams, “dreaming takes your awareness down to the deeper regions of the psyche, where you wonder who you are and what you’re doing in the world. Whatever your dream is about, the dream is like a futuristic submarine, a vehicle for exploring your depths” (p. 73).

The beautiful story of this man and woman and their love for life and family needs to be told. A book that explores the life and vibrancy of their home and the solace that so many friends and family members, including one gangly, awkward, and shy love-starved niece sought and found there needs to be written down for this generation and those that follow in our family, and it needs to be told for all readers to connect to their own stories of their loved ones and special places in their own lives. I am leaning into that dream, all these years later, putting word after word after word down, with my Aunt Sue as my guide.

Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash