I’m in my office, although it doesn’t look anything like my office in waking life. But, alas, my desk seems just as messy. I have a book open to a chapter from a novel by Jane Austen (I don’t recall which novel or which chapter); the book was large, like it was an omnibus of her complete works. As I come up to the desk, perhaps to continue reading, I notice that, right above the book, a baby pygmy elephant is sleeping. The elephant is very small, tiny even, only a few inches tall — but perfectly formed, kind of like the tiny liquor bottles you can get on a plane. It’s adorable! And sound asleep.
Right next to its tiny head and tiny trunk is the toe of an old brown shoe, that for some inexplicable reason, I have sitting on my desk, diagonally next to the book (I told you, it was a mess). I feel like I have to get a selfie of this amazing “still life” moment on my desk; not “still life with woodpecker,” but still life with tiny elephant. It seems only one thing was missing — I should be sleeping next to my little pachyderm friend. But if I pose like that, a) how would I keep from disturbing the tiny napper, and b) how to take the selfie? With my essential tremors, taking a selfie is challenging in any situation, but this seems almost impossible to engineer.
Nevertheless, I gently bend down so that my face is next to the elephant, practically nose to trunk. I am very quietly attempting to position my phone above the desk so as to take the picture, when my wife walks up. “I’m glad you’re here,” I whisper, then I point out the sleeping animal and explain what I want to do. She agrees to take the picture. As I position my head on the desk to pose as I wanted, it occurs to me that if my mom were still alive and she saw this picture, she’d want to know why a shoe was on my desk. Just then, my beloved asks, “What’s that shoe doing on the desk?”
I decide I need to write a haiku to commemorate this wonderful moment. Even though I know that a 5-7-5 syllable count is truly not necessary in writing English haiku, still I figure since this is my first attempt at writing a haiku I should try to be respectful of the traditional form. I compose the poem in my head, and tweak it a few times, until I am finally happy with it.
Open book on desk Pygmy elephant naps there A shoe by its head
Nota bene: This is a dream I had, just this morning. It was lucid; the giveaway was the minuscule elephant (in real life, even newborn pygmy elephants are three feet tall and weight 200 lbs!).
The allusions to Jane Austen and George Harrison were very much in the dream, and I suppose the nod to Tom Robbins was as well, but I didn’t realize that one until I was writing it down.
What’s especially playful about this dream is that tonight I am, for the first time, leading a two night retreat at Ignatius House on “Mystical Poetry and Spiritual Verse as a Sacred Practice.” It’s an interfaith-themed retreat, based on an afternoon presentation I did there last year, as part of Ignatius House’s ongoing series of interfaith programming.
The retreat will follow this format: tonight will be a reprise of the presentation from 2025; tomorrow in the morning I’ll lead the participants on an exercise writing pantoums, with the afternoon devoted to haiku. In the evening we will have an opportunity to read and reflect on our favorite poems, and then on Sunday morning we’ll write our own prayer poem, using as a starting point Pádraig Ó Tuama’s wonderful instructions on writing collects (which I learned from him when I attended his workshop in Atlanta last fall).
When I shared this dream (and the haiku) with Fran this morning, she asked me if I were going to read it to the retreatants. I said, of course. And then I figured it was worth posting here as well.
I love to write down my dreams, but I rarely share them with others unless they seem to be deeply contemplative or even mystical in their tone. This dream was much more playful and childlike — but isn’t that “mystical” in its own right? Last night I did some writing on the relationship between mysticism and playfulness (actually, I was lamenting the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship, at least in western religion). So perhaps that was another tributary to this remarkable subconscious moment.
