Dream of a Butterfly Dreaming

Don't tell anyone: Ed and I stole away from work to a matinee of Inception. We were the only souls in the theater. The story is built like a Chinese box and it represents all that is great about stories, the imagination, and matinees. For the two or so hours it cranked along, Inception gave me something to think about -- other than how ghastly the weather is currently in The Presidio, which seems to be Thought No. 1 these days.

Do you know what happens here in The Presidio in July and August? Well, it's not summer. Unless it's some sort of Christopher Nolan-devised anxiety-inducing dream-state. (Actually, if you wonder what the sky looks like here in summer, take note of how the sky looks in the crumbling world DiCaprio and his partner imagined in the film. Same-same.)

The sky is a silver dome. As someone who spends as much time as she can outside each day, this sky is both depressing and infuriating. On the really bad days, I am convinced someone has rigged this sky, Inception-style, to drive us all mad. Not that a few odd days of the big, glowing silver bowl -- (do we live in some hotel buffet steam-table serving vessel? Will a great spoon come and pull me out and slap me on a plate?) -- wouldn't offer some coolish variation on shades of blue and luminous clouds. But what happens in The Presidio is bright grey arrives, slaps down on us, and we live this way until September.

During these months, I walk around my writing studio, patrol the beaches and fields, and try not to scream.

I've been told there are more microclimates in the San Francisco Bay Area than anywhere else on Earth. Can this be true? I know if I walk about a mile over the hills here, I will hit true summer -- hot sun, tanned legs, tall, sweating glasses of iced tea.

However. Do I flee my home because the weather doesn't meet my needs? Or do I stick it out, go all white and pasty, and shove my weary brain into books and matinees? This feels like the more noble path: The weather and I are meeting, eye to eye, and I am learning what it is to feel honestly blue because I cannot, will not see the blue sky.

What is the weather learning from my resilience? Am I schooling the sky?

Part of my reading-to-ignore-the-silver-sky takes this form: The skeptical philosophy of Chuang Tzu. Does Christopher Nolan read Chuang Tzu? His work suggests so. At any rate, for obvious reasons given this oppressive and relentless sky, this work resonates for me. Perhaps this is the question: Is the weather trying to tell me something via the writing of Chuang Tzu? Or am I Chuang Tzu dreaming of the weather and how I will write about it in my book? Or am I Leslie Carol Roberts dreaming of a sky that is still weeks away holding tight with the trees and the great band of nesting migratory birds that keep me company each day?

"Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things."
(The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans Burton Watson, Columbia University Press, New York, 1968)