[Note: This poem, inspired by Gene Gendlin’s approach to Focusing-oriented dreamwork, is a follow-up piece to “Postscript”, which I posted here last November. It was drafted shortly after that piece, but for various reasons I put it aside at the time and have dipped back into it several times, letting it sit with me, incomplete. Recently it occurred to me that (a) “Postscript”, (b) this poem, and (c) “Seventy-five” (which I posted here in June) combine to form an emotional sequence, with this piece connecting the other two. Together, I see them as marking a “time of turning” in my life. If you want to read them in sequence, you can do so by following the links at the end of the poem. -Robert]
1 A Dream of Fragility
Another night, another dream:
I’m running a training session,
A small group, about ten people,
In someone’s house, just as we did
In the old days of the approach.
And somehow I’m outside
By a busy road
Speaking into a wireless microphone,
With the signal breaking up,
So I don’t know if the people
In the training can hear me.
And then of course my phone rings.
So I go to a brief break in the training;
And answer the phone.
You are there, after 50 years,
Phoning at this precise moment
To make contact.
I tell you I can’t talk now:
I’m about to do a live demonstration:
A short session in front of all these people,
Which I always begin
By publicly imagining a bubble
Around myself and my volunteer client.
This protects the two of us
From judgement or distraction.
While the audience watches to learn.
It’s a good excuse.
But the truth is,
I’m surprised to find in myself
A fragility I didn’t know I had,
As if your phone call
Was the foreshock to an earthquake
Revealing a previously unknown
Fault line in my world.
Then phoning you back
Once the live demonstration
And the rest of the training session are done,
I feel my body begin ease
At the sound of your voice:
You are OK, it sounds like.
I’ve been so worried about you,
As if I couldn’t afford right now
To lose another foundational
Person in my life.
(Philip and Margaret are both dead.)
Then my alarm goes off,
Insistently beeping in the gathered dark,
And the dream of you vanishes
Like the soap bubble
Wish fulfilment dream
That it was.
Yet I’m left with:
You are still out there in the dark.
I know where you are,
But I do not know how you are
Or even who you are now.
And I don’t even know if this dream
Was about your fragility or mine,
Or even how to tell the difference.
2 Associations: Professional and Personal Bubbles
Where this dream of fragility takes me:
As a therapist, I’ve long focused
On other people’s fragility:
Anybody’s fragility…
As long as it’s not my own.
The therapeutic bubble,
Well boundaried and one-sided.
But this has always been an illusion,
An avoidance of my own fragility,
Another soap bubble fantasy
Of solidity and safety.
This makes me wonder about
All the different bubbles
That buoy my life,
Like a fragile raft
In the middle of large ocean,
My life like a brief bubble
In the sea of time,
Mostly spent
On all manner of things
Significant and insignificant.
The fragile feeling says:
Now there is far less
Of that life remaining
Than what has already passed;
I’m mostly done.
Of course, I pretend this is not the case,
I ignore the truth
That compared to most humans
Who have ever lived
I am on borrowed time,
Beyond my span.
I let myself forget
That my life is a debt
That can – and will –
be called in at any time.
My little life is like
An aneurysm about to burst,
A blood bubble in my brain,
A fragility on which
My continued existence depends.
Many questions bubble up in me,
Have I done enough?
Have I made a difference?
Have I lived a worthy life?
Does anyone care?
Will anyone remember me?
Does that matter?
3 Carrying Forward: The Song of the Bubbles
I don’t know how
To answer these questions.
They leave me speechless
And empty-handed.
So I wait. And I wait.
And this is what comes:
All I know is to go with the bubbles,
To dance to the song of the bubbles.
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,
We are all bubbles,
Our little lives and loves.
Bubble after bubble:
Bubbles emerging from
Geothermal vents
At the bottom of the ocean.
It’s bubbles all the way
Up and down.
Soap bubbles and soup bubbles;
Financial bubbles propelled by excitement or greed;
Bubble tea: floating tapioca beads,
The fad its own kind of bubble.
We are all bubbles,
Our little lives and loves,
Bubbles all the way
Up and down.
Speech bubbles evaporating
Into the next frame of my life.
Hope bubbles bursting into despair
Like broken blisters.
Despair bubbles bursting into hope,
Like geodesic domes on the moon.
Our little lives and loves,
We are all bubbles,
Bubbles all the way
Up and down.
My life bubble surrounded by the time
before my birth and beyond my death;
Quantum foam, constantly flickering in and out of existence,
No solidity anywhere, afloat and adrift.
We are all bubbles
In time and space,
Our little lives and loves;
Bubbles all the way
Up and down.
-Pleasanton, Oct 2024 (revised, Lodi, July 2025)
-Images generated by AI using Adobe Firefly Image 4, using selected verses as prompts.
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