Whirling Dervishes by Ellen Paritz Gittelsohn
Inspired by “The Transmigrating
Soul,” from Yiddish Folktales
edited by Beatrice Silverman Weinreich.
I am wedged in between my Labrador
Retriever, who has decided to sleep with us all winter, and my
husband. Although she is small for a lab, her sixty pound body
migrates from my corner of our king sized bed to pressing against my
right leg. Sometimes she finds her way to the middle and presses
against my left leg. My husband, the alpha male, maintains his
snoring space all night long. Sometimes I mistake my lab for my
husband because they both snore. She snores, I poke him, he turns
over. One night they both kept snoring and turning. Someone was
scratching.
In the middle, I had a dream that my
husband and I were ganging up on our teenage son who refused to tense
up over keeping his passport in the safety of an inside pocket. Do
all teenagers travel through life with important documents falling out
of outside pockets? Did I at that age?
Our lab wakes me up from the dream at
5:30 by turning around until she finds the perfect spot to plop down
on my stomach. My husband or lab finally stops snoring and begins
cuddling until I formally wake up at 6:30 for transcendental
meditation (TM).
Stage three TM brings me to a small
Celtic village in England close the the border of Wales. Grateful
for the law that if one travels through the unified field without
moving her physical body, she does not have to carry a passport.
Knowing that the Celtic village is now a museum that happens to be
closed on Sunday, I lie down in one of the tents and catch up on much
needed solitary rest. Completely refreshed after twenty minutes, I
dress and go downstairs for breakfast with our son who is getting
ready for a school bonding trip to Spain. Students he had only met
during his normal online class time would be taking the
superconductor tunnel across the Atlantic. He didn't need pack a
lunch since they would be happily eating street food in Madrid by
noon. He simply needed to make sure that darn passport was packed
securely in an inside pocket.
Since my husband was off to record moon
craters, I was bound for spending the afternoon communicating with
the dog. She stayed next to me transferring thought as I shaved food
off the mammoth growth pods in our greenhouse.
“I like to be close even though I'm
an annoyance.”
“You're not an annoyance.”
“Some nights I just can't stop moving
as I dream about rabbits, squirrels and sometimes the cat across the
street.”
“Dad couldn't stop moving either.
The two of you were my whirling dervishes.”
“It's animal nature to revolve.”
“You're quite the philosopher.”
“I'm your dog.”
“Your pure love.” I transferred
looking at her soft brown eyes, running my hand then my face over her
impossibly soft flat head with velvet floppy ears.
.
