Some people call it God

As you may know from previous posts, I’m a great one for seeing the universe in symbolic terms, by which I mean that what happens outside us reflects what’s going on inside us. And, as you may also know if you’ve been paying attention, a couple of months before Christmas I acquired a new computer.

    As soon as it was plugged in, and while the computer man was showing me how to use it, it started to misbehave in dramatic fashion. The screen would flash and then break up into something resembling an Escher painting (see below) and then the whole machine would die. Sometimes it restarted itself and sometimes it didn’t.

    The computer man was aghast - the machine had behaved perfectly while he’d tested it in his workshop – and blamed us. Eventually, after we’d swapped all the peripherals (plugs, leads, screen etc) and the machine still misbehaved, he agreed to swap it for another new one, but suggested we use it with something called an ‘uninterruptible power supply’ which is a small box that evens out fluctuations in electricity and keeps the computer going if the electricity drops out. This we did and the new new computer has behaved much better than the old new one, only failing twice (so far).

The other night I had a dream over which I’ve been puzzling ever since. Someone was offering to ‘sort me out’ - unravel my problems and turn me into a fully functioning human being. I was so happy. I felt that wholeness was only a short step away. The only trouble was we kept being interrupted  - two old friends turned up, someone came to ‘do the flowers’ – and eventually I woke up.

    I was so disappointed. Why did dreams keep doing that to you? Why did they lead you on and then desert you just as something really interesting was about to happen?

   

This morning, twenty-four hours later, I decided to write out the dream and try and work out what it was trying to tell me.

    ‘It’s the interruptions that are important,’ Frog had said.

    Ye-es, I thought. But what about them?

    But then, as I wrote the final line of my account of the dream, the answer came to me.

    I was like my computer. I too needed an ‘uninterruptible power supply’.

    I think some people call it God.

And here, because a picture of a small black box isn’t very interesting, is a picture of Exmoor between Christmas and New Year where we went for a walk – along with most of the rest of the population of Devon and Somerset (but I’ve managed not to reveal that in the photograph).

Exmoor at the end of December