Sacred Heart #29

At night, in my dream, I stoutly climbed a mountain,
Going out alone with my staff of holly-wood.
A thousand crags, a hundred hundred valleys –
In my dream-journey none were unexplored
And all the while my feet never grew tired
And my step was as strong as in my young days.
Can it be that when the mind travels backward
The body also returns to its old state?
And can it be as between body and soul,
that the body may languish while the soul is still strong?
Soul and body – both are vanities;
Dreaming and waking – both alike unreal.
In the day my feet are palsied and tottering;
In the night my steps go striding over the hills.
As day and nigh are divided in equal parts –
Between the two I get as much as I lose.

Po Chu-I (772 – 846) was a Chinese musician, poet and politician during the Tang dynasty.

Soul and body – both are vanities; dreaming and waking – both alike unreal. Dreams…we have them every night. As a person with rheumatoid arthritis, I can identify with the poet’s tottering feet and some of my most joyful dreams are those in which I am running through meadows and over hills.  

Our minds and imaginations go on journeys our bodies will never experience. We fly, we leap, we cry, we laugh, we encounter danger, revisit old faces and places. There is such a thin veil between dreaming and waking, and as this poem suggests between the body and the soul. Both are real and unreal.

I think we have all awoken from a dream with a pounding heart, eyes full of tears or the touch of another’s lips on ours. Was it a dream or reality? If they are equal, does that make them the same?