Crone code

Had a strange, numinous dream followed by a half-waking, hypnagogic rumination (oops, just looked up "hypnagogic" and it seems to specifically refer to the state immediately before sleep, not after, which sucks—is there a term for the state immediately following sleep? yes indeed! Hypnopompic! much better). 

Anyway, a wise old crone with a shit ton of icy electric witchy energy said to me, "What if you accepted that this is your life?" That doesn't sound like a very profound question, really, in waking life. But, as phrases sometimes do in dreams, it had a deep resonance. 

What if I accepted that this is my life. 

Half awake, I felt a great many of my desires, yearnings, hopes, projections and fears slip away. Maybe they didn't disappear completely, but they definitely receded. What if this is it? This is your life. 

I have been tumbling in a wide variety of strange and not particularly present speculations, coulda woulda shoulda hindsight (definitely not 20/20), hopes, fears, anxiety. The simple idea of being in this present of this life and accepting that this is simply it felt radical to me. There's no past happening now and no future is going to happen. 

For certain, one thing the phrase clarified is that I have not been accepting that this is my life. And that clarification laid bare a great many things that I have either been hoping would happen, or expecting would happen, or fearing would happen, or had looked back on and wished had not happened, or had happened differently, or I had another chance to experience, just one more time, or whatever. 

I find it both extremely disappointing and radically liberating to realize that none of the things that I wish were going to happen, are going to happen. I mean, any old fool could tell me that. The crone, the opposite of a fool, *told* me in a way I could hear. *Told me.* But in the form of a possibility: what if?

The crone snapped me back to right now, and, not unkindly, suggested I start where I am and fuckin' forget the rest. I have had that thought myself, but it was only on the level of a thought. In the dream, it was numinous and profound, not just a series of words, but a shield. An emblem and a code. Or the solution to a code. 

Crone code. Cracked.