Love & Power

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

DREAM that I am with my sister and my mother in a big house full of people, a communal place. But even though I “belonged” there, I didn’t exactly feel at ease. I didn’t have anything to do and I was bored. So I told my mother I was going down to the store to buy myself some tea. Then I was with my sister, practically stuck to her side, kind of wedged against the wall while she was setting up for a group photograph of some group of men, some kind of committee with power. She wanted to leave lots of space around them in the shot, but I told her I wouldn’t bother, they always crop the pictures very tight. I remember seeing Christopher Pett as a grown man, when the men started coming in.

DREAMWORK:

I have known for some time that ‘my place’ is with community, even though I appear reclusive and live like a hermit in the middle of the city. In my dreams and waking life I travel always with the feeling that I don’t fit in, that I don’t belong anywhere. I think I started to get this feeling just before puberty, the age of discernment, of separation, when I started to take life apart. In the dream I also did not have purpose, one of my own and therefore one for being in the group, as if the two are the same, or intertwined. My birth chart tells me the same thing, my sun, Chiron, and Mars all in the 10th house of career and vocation.

What is my purpose then? It seems intrinsically at the core of career and life’s work that I can’t go on without knowing what it is. I’ve known for a long time that it has to do with healing, and I still feel certain of that. But to say that my life’s purpose is to heal and help others heal no longer suffice for me as a purpose. It is like a gushing tonnage of water without a container. There’s no direction, no course, no form, at least not apparent to me. I need that apparency (is that a word?) now, certainly more transparency.

Healing from individuals into community. Bringing the nuclear way of life into the tribal, like a midwife. That’s all I got for now, but I sense more is coming, soon. Back to the dream…

My mother and my sister were both there, so this is my people, this is where I belong, even if my feelings deny it. I told my mother I was leaving for a while, perhaps to go get some ‘wake-up’ and comfort (tea). At any rate, I wanted change. But I don’t remember actually going anywhere. Instead, I was literally stuck to my sister, my shadow familiar, who was preoccupied with the image of patriarchy. (Am I obsessed with the image?) But she is trying to show me something different about this image I have of it, by giving it lots of space around, more space than I thought necessary, as I’ve formed my perception of it already. To see patriarchy with more breathing room, more leniency, more freedom to move, more possibility, will perhaps bring more flow into it too.

Christopher Pett was a boy I went to grade school with, he had just immigrated from England with his family. I hadn’t remembered him until now, but I would say although he was a ‘foreigner’ just like me, he and his background was much less alien than mine. He was an introvert and kept to himself, just like me, but he didn’t stick out either. He appeared to be himself, and fit in. Now he is shown as part of the power collective in the community, so it is saying to me that even someone as reticent as he can be powerful and be comfortable with it. But they are still all men, at least in my image of what’s powerful. So I still associate power with the masculine, but is that ‘wrong’? It is if I believe it’s still ‘a man’s world’ and allow that to hold me back from what I need to do. It is if that power is locked up and segregated within myself so my feminine is left powerless.

Another scab to pick off and jettison, another layer of dead skin to shed. So I can welcome into the spotlight the new girl, pink and fresh with health. I want to love her, this new baby girl, an auspice for a new way of life for me. And I believe I can love her as my own, as much as anything or anyone is my own, as myself. I shall call her Meme** (as in me-me).

It was kind of a strange little scene to see my head tucked into the side of my sister’s neck, and felt the need for that degree of closeness in the dream. I have come to rely on her a great deal, my shadow feminine, and I realize just this moment that I love her too. Now I want the power of my masculine to flow in exchange with the love of my feminine, so power and love are available to both, and become as one.

**Interestingly, meme means “an idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behavior that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by peers, information media, and entertainment media)”, according to the Urban Dictionary.