Higher Journey, Lower Self

DREAM:

I had won a chance to higher education elsewhere, and I have to make several transfers of vehicles to get there. The thing was I didn’t really know how to get there, which bus to take, etc. Jen (my assistant in Sunday School years ago) was there and willing to help me. She gave me several pieces of paper with numbers on them that were supposed to help get me there. I remember one divided into equal squares (12, 2 rows of 6, I think) with large bold black double digits printed in each square. I didn’t know what it meant exactly but felt it was important. But Jen only took me as far as she was going, and as she was leaving, she gave me a little smile and said, “You’ll be all right.”

Somehow I got on another bus and I wanted to ask the driver whether I’m going the right way. We stopped for a short break as it began to get dark, in an area where there were picnic tables. While I was getting off the bus I noticed I was wearing an outfit like a Catholic schoolgirl – white shirt and a mini plaid skirt. As it was getting chilly I put on a sweater.

The first guy I asked was young and small in stature, with a lively glint in his eyes and an abundance of sunny hair down to his shoulders, a braid beside each ear. I asked him for directions but he grabbed me and tried to kiss me. I twisted so his lips landed on my right eye instead. I was irritated but saw an older (middle-aged) black guy was sitting down a few tables away with a couple of younger people. He seemed fatherly and benign and I decided to approach him.

DREAMWORK:

I wonder if this dream has to do with the doubts I started having yesterday about applying only to one job, and whether I received the guidance correctly, etc. My resolve was weakening...

This is a dream about the journey to higher learning that I am on. In the first leg of the journey I was aided by my shadow, repped by Jen, who was my assistant when I was in charge of Religious Education in the church my family belongs to. My own faith and spirituality came to a point of crisis as my own life fell apart in my thirties, and it was as good a reason as any for me to make a break out of my religious ties following my divorce. I divorced a lot of things then. The practice of christianity in our time has never sat right with me, even as a child I could not reconcile and swallow most of what I saw and heard in the church. I have since found out about God in a way that includes everything and everyone in the universe, even the church my family still belongs to, but have I perhaps written off everything about church-going (not christianity) too absolutely, unforgivingly? Is it pertinent to this dream, to me?

I can see in my mid-life hindsight that church is what the gatherings and ceremonies at the Six Nations Fire is, the sacraments for fasting, cleansing, renewal, healing, and acts of sacrifice; the rituals of worship, teaching, prayer, singing and music making, offering, feasting; and the community services in the initiations and milestones of life. These structures are all in place and common in their purpose; what’s different are the focus of intent in each house of spirituality.

The christian church focuses on God the Father in Heaven, and even though the Catholics revere Mary as the Mother, she is not on the same level of the pedestal as the male godhead. The indigenous way of life focuses on Mother Earth, the love and nurture of mother nature, and although the Creator is referred to as a ‘he’ in English, it is generally known that it is not gender-specific, certainly not heavy on the masculine. Women are given places of their own in society, family and community, and empowered to take charge of their roles as elders, clan mothers, caregivers, healers, dancers, healers, teachers, etc. In christian churches, and many other organized religions today, women have only begun to regain their footing and expression as fully human as men, and only after thousands of years of enduring and resisting patriarchal oppression and mistreatment.

I sense this fundamental difference in the way that christianity and other religions like it, ‘aspire’ to heaven – the energy and longing is upwards – heaven is ‘up there’, not to mention hell is ‘down there’ – the realm of the elemental air and ether; knowledge, intellect, ambition, and analytical mind. In its shadow there is hell, the earthly, the soiled, primitive, unrefined, the physical, and the material – the flesh is weak and burdensome and disease-ridden, therefore needs to be denied, hidden, shunned, suppressed, shamed, denigrated, and punished. And the original sin was born. Human beings are split down the middle, saggitally as masculine and feminine, transversely as body and mind. Heaven and earth (or hell), black and white, light and darkness, right and wrong, good and bad. Divorce all around.

Will we survive this deepest split in ourselves and in our world, or is the necrotic festering too great in the wound, and we are beyond redemption? I don’t know the answer to that, although both scriptures and indigenous legends prophesy a new heaven and new earth after much turmoil and catastrophe. But will there be human beings in this new world, when the dust settles?? And if there isn’t, is that such a ‘bad’ thing in the big scheme of things?

My goodness, how I digress... back to the dream...

What was in my shadow? If, in the beginning the Goddess, the Great Feminine ruled the world, then it is natural that at some point that balance of power began to shift in ‘favour’ of the Great Masculine, as the Great Wheel of Life is in perpetual turning and changing. To say that it is a Great Wheel is to say that it takes thousands (or more) of years to reach the end of a full revolution, something a tiny human life of 4 scores in years cannot possibly conceive by intellect and reason alone. There is a feeling amongst the New Agers that the end of this cycle of masculine dominance is near, just as at one point in history, thousands of years ago, people must have felt the end of the feminine rule upon them. Whether we will live long enough in this life to see enough evidence of this changing of the guard to convince us that it is indeed happening, no one seems to be sure. But if I trust what I feel and sense and how I am compelled by the energy that’s all around me, inside me, then I have no doubt this is so.

So in the scope of this vision it does not matter which place of worship I go to, which faith I align with, as long as I continue to do my own work to heal that split, I am serving Life, in all of its tides. We can stop blaming church and christianity, fundamentalism and patriarchy, wars and famine and cancer. It is far holier that we let go of the resentment, the resistance, and rejection, for everything is as it should be, as IT wills. I can begin to make this change in myself.

I don’t know the significance of the papers my shadow gave me, nor what the numbers mean, except that they were important for me to have.

With little in the way of knowing, I got on the bus anyway, with much trepidation and doubt, not unlike how I feel these days. During a rest stop, perhaps signifying these last 3 months of ‘retreat’, I saw an opportunity to find some answers, or better yet, guidance. The first person I encountered was my Animus, but an immature, trickster-like character whose game was seduction. His charm backfired and I was repelled instead of attracted. I needed guidance, not romance. Although to be fair, I may have made myself out to be ‘in the game’, by dressing in the Catholic schoolgirl come-get-me outfit when I started the journey.

The older, wiser and darker (more depth) man exuded integrity, magnanimity, and patience, like a good teacher, mentor and father. Exactly the man (masculine) I need.

Here’s a couple entries for my personal dream dictionary:

Hair: charm and beauty and attractiveness; image and appearance; seductive quality. I equate beautiful hair with an idealistic attractiveness.

Skin tone: darker the skin, the more ‘cooked’ the character – more depth, wisdom, more solid and earthy.
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Saturday, September 3, 2010

DREAMS:

Someone had made a weapon out of a club or paddle, and put some long, vicious looking metal coiled blade on the fat end to hit another person over the crown, to cave their head in. I’m not sure now if the intended victim was me, but I was desperately trying to get away or trying to help that person get away. I woke up in a fright and the backs of my thighs were aching in a big way, the same way they would in waking life when I see something too viscerally painful to watch, but about 25 times more intense.

I was in a place with my siblings and my cousins. The light was a bit dim, as if it’s a cloudy day. There were potted plants of various kinds and sizes everywhere in the room. I began to move one of them, a big one, to the window ledge, to make some room on the floor, to clear a path.

I was looking down and saw that I was pregnant, at least 6 months along. A guy was with me. I thought it was Michael even though it didn’t look like him.

DREAMWORK: (from the body)

Run! Run! Run! The fear screamed, when I dropped into the memory of that pain in my hamstrings, You’re about to get killed! The ‘blade’ was serpentine-coiled and rusty because it’s ancient wisdom and mystery that’s about to descend on my head and pulverize my brain like a meat-tenderizer. Some drastic, ‘home-made’, but brutal measure needs to be taken to ‘cave’ my head in, and my ego is terrified of this upcoming fate. Is it not better to surrender nicely on your own, Ego??!

Next part: My kin, my familiars, my own generation, we are growing and nurturing hope and life for the future ‘at home’. The plants were a bit straggly, how plants get when they’ve had to live through periods of neglect or trauma but survived, and none of them flowering. The whole scene was a bit gloomy and drab, as if we were desperate to keep it going, and just barely hanging on. This is a pretty accurate and revealing picture of my generation of kindred spirits, who are trying and doing the best they know how to reverse the red tide that threatens to wipe us out. But so many things are against our efforts, even ourselves, unwittingly, and without any visible sign of progress our hope begins to dwindle, our energy sapped by resistance. I was not really conscious of this state of despair until now.

It is up to me to make a move myself, one action at a time, to make a path through this disordered scene, move one plant at a time into the light. It was a living room but the plants have taken over, because we have allowed it to become that way. Our intentions were for the good but we have not followed it through with work on ourselves, to heal and move towards balance. We are those slightly crooked plants that still bear the wounds of our trauma and disease, trying to survive in the insufficient light of the room. We are house plants that have stayed sheltered all our lives, afraid to go out into the world and face the harsh dangers as well as the tender beauty. And we have become complacent, indifferent, and lifeless. Another warning.

But there is hope, real hope – I am pregnant! There is new life inside of me waiting to be born, and my masculine is with me. Happy ending!