"you can count days, or you can make days count."

After several attempts, I finally stayed awake through the movie Inception.  I am still completely confused by the whole thing but, basically, the movie is about a team of people who build dreams within dreams to gather information and perpetuate certain future actions by their chosen subject.  The team enters the dream state, does their business, and a "kick" or a quick jolt is used to wake them and bring them back to reality.  The theory of "inception" is to implant an idea that when the subject awakens, he/she will then act upon it benefiting the party financing the entire thing. In order to make it seem as if the dreamer/subject came up with this idea on his own, the creators have to produce multiple layers of consciousness.  Each added layer presents more challenges and more risk of getting stuck and it turns out that the main character, Cobb, has some secrets that begin to complicate matters for everyone.  Certain events from his past keep Cobb from being able to move forward and he has "built" for himself some "memories" that because of guilt or other attachments he has been unable to let go and parts of these designs begin to infiltrate the dreams used for the mission. Due to the danger of becoming unable to distinguish between the architect-ed dreams and the "real world", Cobb and his team have chosen small items called "totems" that can be carried at all times and the weight and/or action of them help the user determine the reality of each situation.  Cobbs totem is a spinning top that will fall when the gravity of reality pulls it downward.

Recently, I assisted with a surgical repair of a large melanoma that required the surgeon to separate a portion of the patients facial and neck skin in order to rotate it around to fill the space where the affected skin had been removed.  To assist the doctor, I held the skin in my hand while hemostasis was obtained.  To help the patient, and lighten the sterile atmosphere of the room, I conversed with the patient and his wife.  I became aware that they had been business acquaintances of my dad.  While we talked, thoughts of my dad came flooding in.  Memories of watching him work, sitting at his drafting table, and hearing him tell stories about meetings he attended.  I mentioned that it was nice to visit with people who remember him as there are many in my life now who have never met him.

Later that day I took some of my kids bouldering out to the old Teton dam site.  As my thoughts wandered, I overheard the kids talking about the dam breaking and a grandpa (that they have never met) clearing the area that day of construction workers with a warning of impending danger and then fleeing the canyon behind them as the dam broke and washed away the earth behind him. And more memories came flooding in...I thought about driving out to the site with my dad, sitting next to him on the fabric seat of the old pick-up truck, eating cookies and drinking a cold can of rootbeer as I listened to his stories.  It made me feel like a kid again.

So, as a proverbial kid feeling the loss of my father and without perspective gained over years of growth and prayer, I was unprepared to process my thoughts when the guy down the canyon began shooting his gun at the canyon walls.  More than a hundred shots and shells and echos later, I forgot how to breath and felt stuck between two levels of consciousness. One level where all I could hear was the sound of the weapon that took his life and another level as a mother feeling helpless to protect her kids as we walked out of the canyon. I was anxious not knowing where this shooter was, angry that no one was there to help me, and frustrated that I had so little control over my emotions.  I felt like that top from the movie, spinning to no end in the dream state and it made me dizzy.  I needed a "kick" or a totem to help me understand and move forward.

But, because I did not have a totem, I waited and struggled for days...so deep in this previously hidden level of space and consciousness, and I could hardly move.  My loss and lack of control so overwhelming to me that I was unable to see my way out of it.  Logic pervaded me and I tortured myself with questions left unanswered, things I want desperately and couldn't have, and fears that weaken my self-esteem.  And I could not wake up no matter how hard I fought the dream and it hurt.

After a night of restless sleep and with a stabbing pain in my back, I dragged myself out of bed, took some motrin, threw on some completely un-matched running clothes, drove out to Heise, and forced myself onto the hillside.  And I counted.  I counted my footsteps...and each breath until it was no longer an effort to take them.  I continued upwards to the top and each time I purposefully emptied my lungs, I chose to let go of the chaos that interferes with everything else and that, for the last couple of days, had completely ruled me.  I let go of negative thoughts, breathed away the desperation of missing people and things, and left the need for answers on the brush of that hillside.   It felt good.  And  it felt cathartic.

It was then that I remembered I do have a totem and I always have had it with me; I just need to remember how to use it.
 
It is the sound of my own breath when I move over the earth and I push my body to cover distance.  It is the air in my lungs that allows me to climb to the tops of things.  It is the notes of my off-key singing when I bust out to the radio with my girls while the wind blows through the backseat.  It is even the breath that catches when someone I love plants a soft kiss on my lips.  It, for me, is the perfect totem and I won't forget it again.

I descended the hillside with renewed energy, deep rhythmic healing breaths, and a new level of consciousness.

I noticed something that I had not seen on the way up.  In my stressed out oblivion I had completely missed the cemetery that marks the sacred history of the family who developed the area.  The words carved on the headstone of a friend from school, taken too early, read, "You can count days, or you can make days count."

And this, was just the "kick" I needed.