However, once I was able to see my anger and recognize it for the role it played, I was able to move from Buster Keaton to Charlie Chaplin and begin the work of choice. My environment shifted simply by shifting my inner view and choosing new ways of meeting the world. Every seemingly minute inner shift meant a different tenor in a conversation, choice of words, and so forth, until old ways of interacting with people were no longer interesting to me, and new people began to come into my life that were attracted to my new ways of interacting. My life began to be populated with loving, kind, and gentle individuals. I moved from a life that was akin to living a perpetual heavy metal concert in a crazy house to a wonderful garden party with interesting guests and sparklers.
My father devoted my entire childhood to preparing me for his death. He did this in many ways. One way is that we talked about his death often, what it meant to him and about his feelings and beliefs about death and beyond. Because we worked with animals, and I saw or even held many animals in death, there were many moments to learn about this essential lesson and big opportunity of our life’s trajectory.
Handling, touching, and feeling death, and talking about it extensively with my father, developed in me a sense of impermanence or lightness to life. At the same time, it gave life a consistency, because all life is a great timeline that began before and will continue on beyond my specific incarnation. As a child, the impermanence bothered me greatly; I wanted to hang on to my father and to things I thought were “good.” But what my father was teaching me is that dying is living—they loop into themselves.
As I began to live as a Dreamer, I came to see the freedom my father’s approach afforded me. Life is biological in every way. Things that are good are to be enjoyed fully in that moment. Like a blossom or a new leaf, their brightness is poetic; if we try to pick it, or keep it, the color fades. Equally, things that are challenging blow through like a storm or a drought; however difficult, they never last forever.
Skipping lightly through life allows me to love deeply and clearly, to experience disappointments and exhilarations from an even perspective and to move beyond the constraints of larger expectations. This is another way of expressing detachment.
Detachment is not a removal or a cold turning away; it is a full embracement without clutching, grasping, or imprisoning. It is experiencing in totality the brilliant new leaf without picking it. There is no need to pick it when the greater consistency, the larger timeline, is enduring. The leaf can be enjoyed because every stage, every season, is interesting; and as one leaf dies, another is born. This perspective on death also planted seeds in me for being fluid and facile with change.
Change often accompanies, or catalyzes, the death of parts of ourselves. Look closely at any plant that is blooming—even as one part is blooming, there are other twigs or offshoots that have browned, died, and are falling off. This is a natural pruning, required for growth. Once we realize that parts of ourselves die many times over throughout our life and that this kind of death is required for us to move to new places in our evolution, change becomes surmountable and even welcome. This also prepares us for the physical transitions of loved ones and eventually our own death. Imagery is a way of pruning aspects of the self and rebirthing.
Another way my father prepared me for his death was to assure me that he was always with me whenever I would travel away from him. I would ask him if he meant that metaphorically or “for real.” He would tell me directly that time and space are ideas and that beyond our physical body we have a spirit body. This body can stretch and extend wherever and whenever we choose it to. He would tell me that he was choosing to continue to be with me no matter how far away I might go. I felt this to be true, and it brought all distance to within an instant for me. Later, when my father did die, it was not a debilitating event. While I grieved his passing, death was a movement into another idea of space and time, which was accessible in other ways than the physical.
I find my father accessible through both imagery and dreams, and he has visited me four times since his death. The first visit dream happened a few days after his funeral. I dream:
I am back home in the family kitchen with my mother. I hear my father’s pickup truck turn from the road onto our long driveway. I race out to the garage to meet him, and, as he always did, he turns off the engine and plays the game of coasting the truck as far as it can go toward its parking spot. We both got a lot of enjoyment out of this game. We lived out in the country and so our driveway was very long. Getting a full coast to the parking spot required, probably unsafely, racing around the ninety-degree turn at the head of the driveway as fast as one could. It was our game of chicken. This time, however, my father leaps from the truck as it is still coasting and runs toward me with the door still open behind him. When he reaches me, he scoops me into his arms and buries me in a hug.
When my father and I part from our hug I say to him, “Dad, what are you doing here? You’re dead.” It is very matter-of-fact. He replies, “I know. But I wanted to come see how you are. I wanted to check on you and your mother.” I assure him I am fine. We embrace again, and I leave the dream.
I am completely conscious in this dream, and this dream has a unique quality. Unlike other dreams where I participate unaware, dreams that are about something, or even lucid dreams where I am conscious I am dreaming and can affect outcomes in the dream, in this dream I feel I have literally stepped into a different reality. In this reality I am conscious of my other reality. I do not feel, as I would with a lucid dream, that it is a dream. It is as though one reality is simply laid on top of the other.
The next time I met my father in a dream was a couple of years after the first dream. It, too, had the same reality-on-top-of-reality quality of the first dream. I dream:
I am driving to work in my black Honda Prelude. (This is really the car that I drove, although the work that I was driving to was not my current job, but a past one.) My phone rings. (It is one of the earlier car phones, which I really had, that was hard-wired into the car.) I pick it up and say hello. A man says to me, “Bonnie?” I say, “Yes.” And he replies, “Oh good, we’ve been trying to reach you. Hold on, please, let me get your dad.” I pull my car over and park for the call. I hear a lot of movement and people in the background, and suddenly I see through the line of the call to the other side of it. Here I see my father riding his horse and roping cattle with other people on an expansive green pasture ringed with mountains. There are some other cowboys in the foreground, including the man holding the phone for my dad. I am pleased to see that my father, in this new place after death, is still doing what he loves to do and is happy.
He gets to the phone and is out of breath. “What’s up, Babydoll?” he asks. I laugh. “Dad, what are you doing calling me? You’re dead.” Again, I say this matter-of-fact. He laughs back. “I know. Sorry it took so long, I was way out in the back pasture a long way away, and I’ve been very busy. We have a lot of work to do here, you know.”
I tell my father how happy I am that he’s busy, and that it is clear he’s doing a lot of good work. I’m glad he’s there to do that good work! I ask him why he called. “I just wanted to come up and check in on you. I just want to make sure you’re doing ok.” I assure him that I am, and the dream ends.
I don’t dream again of my father for eight more years. Those dreams I detail in chapter three.
What my father called the spirit body I call the Dreaming body. Because reality is elastic, all things are infinitely malleable. This includes not just time and space, but the solidity of ideas, belief systems, and patterns. With Catherine, I learned I could close my eyes and go sit on a star to see my life in all its perspective, the leading up to and the now, and from this distance I could see it as a play. From this perspective, without the sticky attachments of judgment and habit, I was able to see clearly to untangle the knots that were causing me to trip or repeat detrimental behaviors. I could also work with ancestral patterns, going back to the genesis of distorted actions and clearing myself of their