Sunday, August 22, 2010
DREAMBITS:
My brother was talking, and I could see the words as he talked. I remember seeing “old 爸” (dad), printed by hand.
I was in a room like a small church chapel with pews. There were a handful of small children running around. I was about 12 y.o., wearing one of the plain white cotton dresses that my mother used to make for me and my sister when we were little. Suddenly a dog ran in, a big brown Doberman. He ran up to me, where I was crouched on the floor in between the pews, and started to play-bite my left arm, gnawing on it without hurting me. My whole wrist was in his huge mouth. I felt only a slight fear because he was bigger than I was, but I knew he was just playing out his aggressiveness like animals do. I think there was a smaller dog too, but in the background.
I somehow got away from him and was in the vestibule inside the front door of the church, and saw the Doberman streaked past me into the church. I didn’t even see him leave before.
We were on a family outing to see a movie. Everyone had gone in ahead except for me and my dad at the ticket booth buying tickets. Then my dad left too, cuz you don’t need more than one person to buy tickets. I ordered and paid the girl but it took a while for her to get the tickets to me. She was distracted by the phone, other customers, and the half-circular counter that wrapped around her was big and full of papers and stuff, like a messy office desk. I waited patiently and tracked her wherever she moved along the counter so as not to lose my turn or her attention entirely. Finally she handed the tickets to me, along with various brochures. Everyone there was Chinese, including the movie.
DREAMWORK:
My masculine familiar (my brother) is trying to bring my attention to the ancestral patriarchs of my genealogical line... but why in words and not images? Why mix English and Chinese? And why was it handwritten? What is it telling me about the masculine? Help me understand, my body...
It is about tradition. Although my brother grew up in the West and cannot read or write in his mother tongue, he has always, in his own way, respected and hung on to his roots and its traditions. He followed the ways of the world and has gotten to where he is in life by the road well-travelled, fulfilled the Great American middle-class dream of achieving status quo, and I for one, as holier-than-thou as I can be sometimes, cannot see signs that he is unhappy. He chose to live and stick by traditional values, and they have worked for him. And although I have come to know the values I want to live by, and have only recently learn to hang on to them – after a long detour, for mine is the path lesser navigated – I have yet to set course and launch my ship out of the harbour.
My dream is teaching me to respect other people’s paths, however different they might be from mine, even if they are ones that didn’t work for me, they are just as valid and valuable as paths go. The important thing is not which road you take, but what you take on the road, and what you do with it.
You must have respect for all walks of life, Grasshopper.
Next: The Doberman is a part of me. The young, playful and raw animal energy driven by instinct and the freedom of movement. Yet he (this is a masculine part) has in him the seed of aggression and destruction, and I fear that he may be too much for me to handle in my immature, underdeveloped state. The whole is made of both the masculine and the feminine, and the two energies need to hold each other with healthy respect, knowing when to come forward and take charge, and when to recede into the background. For it is but one body of power, and in a state of flux and ebb concurrently and constantly. In the dream I knew this and knew how to be in this relationship, but did not fully trust my knowing, and have also come to see the masculine energy as strictly a potentially dangerous animal trained to kill and maim (the Doberman), even though I secretly admired and envied his boundless drive and uninhibited freedom. As if he owns the world. And indeed he does, just as I/we do, except I have, through my conditioning and my wounds, allowed myself to be belittled and disempowered, and no longer feel I have the birthright to claim my place in the world, to move and act without self-consciousness, as if I own the world.
I stood by, feeling disenfranchized, resentful, and cowed by the beauty and grace of this raw power that I wished I had, not realizing that I do have it in me, it’s just been stunted, kept small (the little dog in the background). But the good news is, the portent of the dream, is that indeed we have the potential (which cannot be taken away from us – the Doberman that kept coming around) in us, to be the big, beautiful, free spirited and expressive beings that we were made to be. But, like a seed we were born with, it needs the right kind of condition to grow and mature. It needs the safety and purity (white dress) of a sacred space (the church), the sanctity of our inner temple, kept wholey with the constant prayers of the faithful.
Next: It has to do with my Chinese family and roots. Everyone else has gone on blithely with their lives as they were, except for me and my dad, who have chosen (or been chosen) to work on our own healing. Interesting how I’ve never seen the parallel paths we’re on. Then my dad left too, he is only interested in healing his physical symptoms, and has so far resisted confronting any other level. Everyone in my family has chosen to be anaesthetized by mindless filler, just as some part of myself has done. This dream is about my family and my roots, and also the state of the entire Chinese culture, which is in danger of losing its roots in the ‘middle way’ of Taoism. The wisdom of this tradition has been lost to the advances in technology, the bigger-better-faster, multi-tasking of life and its ‘rewards’, and the control and manipulation of the all-powerful god of mass media. We have all fallen under the spell of our time, and waking up is not only difficult, but not even wanted.
It has taken me a long time and much effort to finally have enough patience and fortitude and resources to stay on this path of awakening, but my dream is showing me that I will eventually get the tickets, healing and redemption(!) will prevail for my family, though not my race, the Chinese collective having now joined the global competition for the biggest piece of the pie. Returning to her foundation, the Tao, is the one true way to save China from the demise of collapsing under the weight of her own success, but I don’t think I will have the privilege of seeing that in my lifetime. However, I can help myself and my family through Tao. It sounds radical, as we have been Christian for 3 generations now going on 4, but I feel in my blood that we have been people of the middle way for far longer than that, and it is still behind us, like a backbone, and beneath us, as solid as the earth we walk on.
Found this site on the web: http://ldolphin.org/YinYang.shtml. Looks like a good place to start my studies.
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Monday, August 23, 2010
Days continue to slip by at an alarming pace, what used to feel like a trickling crick is now like a white rapid.
DREAMBITS:
I am with my sister in our apartment. On the balcony I could look down to the ground below, just reddish brown earth with greenery dotted here and there. It seemed about 10 to 15 floors up. We were mending clothes, ours and other people’s. I remember seeing the word ‘mending’. But I was feeling inadequate, as if I’m not really good at it, that my sister was better...
Later I saw people going by with dessert in their hands. One guy was holding a tart-shaped clear plastic dish with blackberry filling in it. All the desserts were made from blackberries. I saw the backside of the chef and knew it was G.L., a pastry chef at Loblaws where I used to work.
DREAMWORK:
Something I am not grounded at all about... 15 floors... What do these ‘floors’ mean, so often I dream of them? They do not mean the same thing, my body says, each dream is unique in its context. But there is always something ungrounded in me that I need to be aware of, being shown to me in each of these dreams.
I am ‘mending’ my personas (clothes) with my shadow (my sister), who is better at it than I am (she knows them better!) The word ‘mending’ is being pointed out to me because mending is what’s needed to heal the issues of my personas, not removing or disposing of them. Right, the baby and the water – the gold in the shadow. The gold in this case is my ability to ‘mend’: to heal. My persona of the healer needs mending, as I am aware of the many issues I have with wearing that hat.
At the moment, I am looking at those from a fair distance – 10, 15 storeys up – but even from this far away I could see the spots of hope here and there (the greenery). Again, I need to surrender to the process (how many times do I need to be told this anyway??!) and let my shadow be my guide. For the reward (dessert) for my summer’s shadow work is at hand – the fruit, blackberries – and the masculine is getting the best part (the filling), the essence of this work, which is made manifest and plain to see (clear container – vessel, channel). All the ‘desserts’ were made from the fruit of this work. All that I shall manifest are results of this work with my shadow, in the dark of night.
It was G.L., the hardworking chef with an independent spirit who knows what she’s working so hard for, and has found a way to be in the (corporate, patriarchal) world in relative comfort and balance, staying true to herself and her objectives, and best of all, having her creativity and eat it too! As an example, she would work long hours and days for several months, then take off on a dream vacation for a few months. She has managed to work out all the pieces of her life to fit this picture that she wants.
I only saw her from the back in the dream because the teaching is that I ought to follow the example of how she came to be where she is with her work (that it serves and supports her creativity and enjoyment of life), and that’s the only side of her my dream is pointing to.
My dream, and my role-model, are telling me that there is a way too, for me, to find this balance in the picture of my working life, to have my cake and eat it too.
_______________
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
DREAM: Yet another dream of being in the early bloom of love, this time with ex-love, G. Though he kept making little advances and gestures of intimacy toward me, he also kept shying away, and his kisses were quick and brief, before he turned half away from me. I remember most clearly his face in profile, peeking at me out of the corner of his lowered eyelid, a little smile playing in the corner of his lips. At one point we were walking with some friends outisde, and he put his arm around me. I longed for him to really kiss me. Then I was alone at home (second floor) working in my studio (I was a designer), when I glanced out the wall-to-wall windows in the front (it was like a sun room) I caught a glimpse of someone’s head passing by on the street below. I wasn’t sure if it was him, but my heart leapt up in a flutter, my soul ached from straining toward him.
DREAMWORK: I had a sudden flash while in the shower (another watery insight!) that these amorous dreams I’ve been having are healing dreams! Unlike ones I used to have, say, before this year, they were few and far in between, and never gave me the sense of fulfillment nor the depth of longing and pureness of love that these ones do. I wonder if it also has to do with still having some resentment at men for the destruction and cruelties they have wreaked in the world, which flared up briefly last night when we watched the movie “Divided We Fall”, a different kind of story with deep psychological insight into the Czech people during the time of the Nazis, and ultimately of human nature in all of its gore and glory.
All of these ex-loves carry projections of myself and therefore are mirror pieces of my own qualities, good, bad, and ugly. I fell in love at the time with these reflections that I saw in them, not knowing that it was myself, my inner masculine, that I longed for and loved. But it was only what was in the mirror that I attracted me, like Narcissus, the rest didn’t fit, so they all became ex-es. It has taken me 25 years to realize that the love I truly seek, have sought for so long, is in me. I think I have a glimpse just now, of how and why Rumi wrote his timeless poetry of the Beloved. It is as if once you touched the source of the spring, it never stops flowing for you, from you, through you. Rumi found the Source, and he never left.
Now I wish the same for myself, not only to tap into the flow, but to bath in it, drink from it, and revel in it. I don’t ever want to be apart from it. I think this is what they mean by the fountainhead of God, the water of Life, the Eternal Spring.
But I shall get back to the smaller yet no less significant details of the dream that will teach me. My body, help me.
Being a ‘designer’ in the dream is telling me that though I am on the right path of my creativity, I am still wanting to control the design of events in my life. Still planning ahead instead of just allowing the creativity to take place and shape. Still a bit afraid to surrender, like the way he kept slipping away in the dream, in spite of the knowing and the desire to be together. And it is the masculine in me that is fearful still, of not being productive (job and making money: having a job in the dream), not having recognition (a job title: as a designer in the dream), and not being socially acceptable (achieve status quo like everyone else: having friends in the dream, and he put his arm around me, as a show of approval of me, the knave that he was... I am...!). And up on the second floor – still not grounded.
He is a bit of a tease in the meantime, my masculine, still a bit immature, but no less his sweet, lovely self. We will be together one day, my beloved... (Final strains of soft violin plays, as scene fades to black)...
Stay tuned, for the next episode of “Love in Times of the Great Split”...
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