Last year I was standing in the back of a presentation hall at an
international conference on medical excellence. Late in the day a
dream-like image suddenly occurred to me. I perceived a group of six to
ten patients sitting together in chairs patiently looking at the face
of a large watch. (probably a version of my father's gold pocket
watch). The watch hands were stationary.
In this apparition I moved to the back side of the watch. The back
was off of the watch and all of the inner workings were exposed (when I
was a child my father used to unscrew the back of his watch for me to
look inside). Here the apparition became more dream-like--the gears
were made of precious metals, gold, silver, platinum; and each had two
people working on it. The day's speakers were each on a separate gear
and they were polishing the metal with cloths. Each gear really shown
brightly. And each gear also had the CEO of the presenter's
organization on it. The CEOs were embedding precious stones--diamonds,
emeralds, rubys onto the surface of their gears. Most gears had lots of
jewels already set into their surfaces. It was something to behold,
beautiful and the people were very animated.
Then I stepped back a little distance and noticed--the gears did not
mesh, they were not connected, they were not moving together.
Everyone kept applying jewels, polishing, and waiting.
I had an immediate longing for the brass gears of my fathers pocket
watch with their precision fit and perfect time keeping. (There were
jewels in his watch, seventeen I think, strategically placed to keep
the gears turning.)
Since it's first occurrence, this vision has frequently reoccurred to me in my work.
