"... I got lost on the river, but I got found."

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Last night I dreamed that at the end of a long journey, I found myself looking into a vast aquarium at a large blue fish who looked out at me with a steady gaze.  I began to cry.  I woke up weeping.

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Yesterday YouTube churned up a short video devoted to helping students understand what calculus is.  The goal was not to teach calculus but to explain why one would want to learn calculus.  For some reason, I decided to watch it, and was delighted to understand what calculus is.

I remember going back to college when I was in my late 20s and vowing to attempt to learn math from the point at which I had not been able to understand it.  I was good at math until 7th grade when New Math was introduced.  My father who was good at math did not understand New Math and was unable to help me understand it.  I remember my 7th grade teacher taking me aside and saying that she was puzzled by my poor math grades because I was clearly intelligent, having scored in the 99th percentile on the verbal portion of my aptitude tests that she had looked at.  From then on,  I continued to do well in English classes and struggle in math classes, despite the fact that New Math didn't last long in my school district.

In my return to the study of math, rather than learning math in a traditional classroom, I chose to learn in what was called a math lab where I could work independently, at my own pace, and ask for help when needed.  Much to my surprise, math was easy and fun, and I quickly finished the courses up to the point of calculus and was considering taking calculus.  Baffling to me to this day, my former husband who had scored 800 on the math portion of the SAT test, scoffed at my enthusiasm saying, "Why would you want to do that?"  Even more baffling is that I lost my excitement and momentum when I heard those words. 

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When I saw the blue fish in my dream, I remembered the YouTube video and instinctively used a calculus formula which proved, without a doubt, that the blue fish and I had exactly the same volume despite our different physical appearance.

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Last night I was playing around with my autoharp, specifically A minor and D minor.  Suddenly I was playing the first few chords of something that I couldn't identify, having no idea what the lyrics were.  A few minutes ago, I went over to my autoharp and played  A minor and D minor again and again until I was able to identify that it was reminding me of Bob Dylan's song "Lost on the River." 

The song goes with the dream.

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Take what you have gathered from coincidence.  Thanks so much, Bob, wherever you are.

 

Remembering fearless Oboe / Overcoming stage fright from the beginning / Last night's dream

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Last night's dream:

Once again I was surprised and overjoyed to find myself at the ocean, walking across a broad sandy beach to have a closer view of the waves.  Suddenly, without any warning, the ocean was far below me.  The sand and ocean in front of me had dropped hundreds of feet.  Turning in mid-air, I found a tenuous handhold and was able to hang on to the sheer cliff of hard packed sand.  Looking down, I saw that the tide had nearly reached the bottom of the cliff of sand, although there was still some beach left.  Briefly I considered letting go, confident that I would be able to sustain the fall.  Thinking again, it was clear that even though I would survive the fall, the tide was coming in and I would be in danger of drowning or at least spending a long time in the cold ocean water because there was no way to climb up the sheer cliff and no exit either way, north or south, from the beach.  I turned my attention back to the sandy beach I had just walked across with such joy.  I didn't have the strength to pull myself up onto the beach again, but I had the strength to keep holding on.   A young woman appeared out of nowhere.  I told her I needed help getting back on the beach.  She anchored herself as best she could and reached out her hands for mine.  She wasn't convinced that I could be helped and was concerned for me, but I told her not to worry.  With her help, I was able to scramble back up to the beach.  

That's when I woke up.

It's occurring to me that the ocean in my dream was to the east.  Most of my experiences of the ocean have been that it is to the west.  

Tears have been welling up with unexpected frequency in the past month.  Sacred tears.  Just in time.