Pink Shoes and Wallpaper

DREAM that I was in a house with lots of people, some kind of communal living. I had lost my hot pink running shoes, and my friend, another woman, was trying to help me find them. I had given them to J., an older woman from my old church, but she was gone, and the shoes with her.

There was an image at one point of people – all of us – lining up one after another along the walls of the house, like wallpaper being put on. At the same time I had the impression we looked like round logs with a sharp, pointed end on top, as if we are making a walled fortress inside the house…

DREAMWORK:

Yet another shoeless dream… I am still missing what it takes to go out there, shoes being the last thing I put on before going outside, this time my full creative expression of the feminine. Something’s in the shadow still, something I’m not aware of having suppressed that my shadow woman carries. J. was someone who I mostly looked down on and looked away from since I was a child, because she was unattractive, coarse, and there was an awkwardness to her that I couldn’t bare to see. In my youthful arrogance, I thought her stupid. Yet, to be fair, she was kind and had a big heart. I heard that she had cancer a while ago, but I don’t know what kind.

Of course, these things I attribute to her are things I would never want to be, a person I would hate to admit to being, yet I have had glimpses of all of those images in myself. Without doubt I saw the feminine in her, but only as a cow or a sow is feminine. This seems unreasonably cruel and unjust, as the worst thing she had ever done to me was to bore me. How had I come to despise this negative image of the feminine so much? From fairy tales and cartoons of childhood we have been shown the opposite of a beautiful, delicate, young princess bathed in the golden light of benign approval and adoration was the ugly, coarse, misshapened, peasant female. As if the difference excludes the possibility of a good heart, a wise mind, or a beautiful spirit. We were all brainwashed as such. We were all taught to run the other way from the dark, the ugly, the bad. Unless, of course, you are a male, then you can try and kill it and become a hero.

Had anyone seen through the unappealing exterior into J’s loving heart, I wonder? Had she recognized and cherished it in herself? I have that loving heart too, though it’s usually well-hidden. And I admit that I have not allowed myself to full recognize nor cherish it in myself, let alone giving it expression. Here’s what Ambika Wauters said about the colour Magenta, in her book “Homeopathic Color Remedies”:

This color represents the highest level of creativity and is associated with the collective unconscious… It corresponds to the Alta Major Chakra… and is concerned with our higher purpose in life… It is the color Rudolph Steiner believed stood for ultimate creative expression.

This reminds me of other fairy tales where there were beautiful and noble princesses and princes trapped within bodies of ogres because they were put under a spell, who were usually in need of someone wise and kind, who can see through the ugly packaging to love them anyway, and in the process the spell is broken. Well, the immature child I was could not see through the exterior and was bound by her conditioning, but I am older and know better now. Someone like J. had a lot of love to give. She may not always know how to give it, but she made it a priority to give as much as possible. This is her beautiful spirit. And this is what I have denied in her and in myself. But now I am not whole without owning it, these pink shoes I’ve lost. I’ve stifled the natural expression of feminine creativity because I have pursued masculine endeavours all of my life, even now, just as J. has remained single and a spinster, when she clearly loved children and loved to give love. We have lost our way to our higher purpose. At the end of that is the disconnected, unlived life. J. may have passed from this life now, but it is not too late for me.

How to find my way back? How to love the unloved parts of myself? The bad, the ugly, the undesirable? I feel like going down to the beach and finding stones that are these shunned and stunted parts of myself, and hold them to me, put them into my heart, nurse them in my lap like little hurt animals, incubate them in magenta light, until their spirits are healed. I ask also for J. to forgive me.

There is nothing in the way of opening my heart and letting love flow where it is meant to, not even fear. I only have to let it.

The other part of the dream seems to be in the same collective theme. Those of us in the house were called to the same task of lining the interior walls with ourselves as reinforcement of a kind. Fortressing, as I said before, against attack, though it must be against an inner enemy. Who is this inner enemy of mine and my collective? The house and the rooms gave me the impression of being traditional, basic and unadorned, but solid and almost staid. No feminine touch or ambiance anywhere. Us, the people/wooden stakes, were like soldiers, identical and uniform.

Perhaps there IS something in the way of opening my heart after all, perhaps I am still focused on fortressing my inner walls, so nothing can penetrate, nothing can even be hung on the walls to decorate it, to soften its austerity. Have we as a collective built our walls too well, intending to keep the big bad world out, but also cutting ourselves off from all the opposites: beauty, grace, love, and joy? I have the feeling this collective is women, all of us women who have learned to become good soldiers like men, strong and stalwart, but also rigid and closed. We’ve not dared to live fully as women, being soft and yielding, giving and nurturing, creative and abundant. The men in our world are also denied these qualities in themselves, lest they be seen as weak.

So how do I dismantle my inner defenses, and end the need to put up more? Again, just allow it. See the motion of the spikes lining up in reverse, see the people walk away from the wall, as themselves, talking and connecting. And if there’s any inner enemy lurking anywhere, we can love it together. But there’s a feeling in me that says love is soft, therefore not strong, so what if I need inner strength? Love is love, love is not strength or weakness, light or dark, good or evil. Love, is just itself. But love GIVES strength, if I choose to accept it, accept love.