My Deep South

DREAM that I was watching 2 women in a room, as if they were in a movie and I was a viewer. The room was big but dim overall, and I had the sense that it was full of clutter. It had a dated feeling to it, not quite ancient, but at least a few generations old. The women were around 30, although I could only see one of them from the front in the first ‘scene’, the other one was sitting with her back to the ‘audience’. The standing one appeared to be the caretaker of the other, giving her advice. I remember hearing the word ‘magnolia’, and had the sense that that’s where they lived.

Then the scene changed and they were in a public place, like the town hall, crowded with people socializing. The seating was arranged like pews or lecture-style, and the 2 women were sitting with a young man they knew. I think he had red hair. The previously sitting woman was standing on the other side of the room telling someone that her friend, the caretaking woman had told her to leave and do something involving some kind of risk, then come back and try and get Dean back. I wasn’t sure whether she said ‘git’ or ‘give’. Dean was the red-head.

It was only after I woke up that I realized I was only an observer in the dream, and the whole thing was like a movie in a Southern town. Perhaps to do with ‘magnolia’, and all the movie and book associations I have with it.

DREAMWORK:

This dream came from a deeper, dim place in me, a place that I am not familiar and would not call my own, although my heart seems to feel some nostalgia for it, but no where else in my body. As if it’s a romantic notion or memory from time gone by, a bit tarnished now, but still golden under the dust. Life appears to be the norm of the norms, where women always wear dresses and men and women have very distinctive roles. But underneath the sugar pies and toothy smiles, there flows a vein of darkness that’s the blood of the South…

In the first scene the faceless woman was my shadow, being taken care of by my ego self, who was dispensing advice to her, telling her what she should do, with the best intentions of course. The ego was standing over the shadow; but the shadow was the one who ‘under’-‘stands’.

I just realized something all of a sudden: the 2 women have the same face, they are actually one woman in 2 bodies! That’s why I was a little confused while writing down the part about the one standing talking to someone in the hall, because at first I thought she was the caretaker from the first scene. I can see that this encompasses the perspective of them being my ego and my shadow, both are me.

Maybe that’s also why I was unsure about whether she said ‘git’ Dean back, or ‘give’ Dean back…

Are the people in our life always parts of our self, ego and shadow, the light and the dark?

The South is the direction of growth on the medicine wheel, Michael just informed me, and my impression of the American South is a place rife with fecund fertility and a steamy miasma of fierce attachments and tangled roots, societies built on top of the domain of the Black Goddess, a place of hidden mysteries and treasures, where you are constantly and acutelly aware of the unseen and how it overtakes you.

Perhaps the woman is schizophrenic, and this dream/drama is a portrayal of her interior life – reminding me of the book “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” – a necessary projection of her ego self when the shadow self has taken over. When you are living out mainly your shadow life, do you dream of your ego life? Was that what the woman was struggling with, which life to live out of?? Perhaps she has had a past typically seen as Southern (and tragic): riddled with alcoholism, abuse, family secrets and dramas of horrific proportions ricocheting down the generations, not to mention the cavernous rooms of the plantation estates in all of its faded glory. Lives are deeply connected and ancestral, for better or worse. I think of Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers (she’s just popping up like weeds everywhere these days!) Alice Walker, Capote, MLK, Jr. and Oprah Winfrey, the fierce spirits that they are. Like flowers that insist on blooming, no matter how dark the heavens and how wild the storm, because they know they have been anchored by the roots of their tree, for so long that it is inseparable from the land it stands on. They can try, but they can never leave.

I have a glimpse now, of why love and hate run so deep in the people of the South, for the roots that support and feed them are the same ones that bind and keep them. Individuation cannot happen without leaving the clutches of the Devouring Mother.

The South is a cloying, shadowy place, as it is in myself, I am at once fascinated and fearful of it. But I also know it to be full of unmined riches, creativity unseen by the common light of day, and it is deep down in the southern part of myself. The red-head, Dean, is my Prometheus, who has his sight on the future of the collective and there’s a whole townhall-ful, a whole community, waiting for him to bring the fire to light its way forward.

Found this on the web, by James Baldwin:

“The name of the elder of these brothers was Prometheus, or Forethought; for he was always thinking of the future and making things ready for what might happen tomorrow, or next week, or next year, or it may be in a hundred years to come.”

But first I have to be willing to make the sacrifice to the gods and goddesses, the ancestors and our roots, by surrendering all that I own – my sense of self, my beliefs, my identity, my fears, my hopes, my life as I know it – all that I am attached to. That’s the risk I have to take, and what the woman in the dream was telling someone in the town hall. The ‘journey’ she was told by her twin to take, is to go back into the shadowy past of my/our history, and make reparations where necessary. Only when the sins of our forebearers (and ourselves) are atoned will our ancestors be aligned with our future and growth.

I don’t yet have a clear sense of what this means to me and my work – to resolve ancestral debts or iniquities, to give outlet to what’s been suppressed, to make healing possible where needed – as I am not aware of much in the way of ancestral baggage. Perhaps it is more about reconnecting to my lineage, which I have begun to take an interest in through daoism, but really no more than looking at the outside of the box so far. Is there a shadow side to Dao, if everything under the sun has a shadow? What’s in it then? This may be the equivalent of my personal South… I do know that just knowing about Dao in the most superficial sense as I do, I can already feel it in my blood (much like the way the South runs in the blood of her offsprings, I imagine), even though its teachings and ways have been banished in my family for I don’t know how many generations now.

So why were the cast of characters in my dream drama all white, not Chinese? Perhaps because it is a message for the collective, all of humankind, but each of us need to do our own work, through our own lineage.

A dean is an academic administrator or executive, you might say, the one who oversees the smooth running of the whole operation, whose vision includes both the big picture as well as the practical details, and whose priority is always the overall wellbeing of the collective. Prometheus fits the bill, I think, as an avatar for the human race. In my dream though, he was still one of the crowd, not yet called into action. And it’s true that I have not picked up the torch yet, to begin my work in the world. I hope I’m not far, but I really don’t know.

Apart from its obvious association with the South, what does Magnolia signify to me? Magnolia flowers are one of the earliest to appear in our springs, entire trees are covered in huge blooms before any foliage, although seeds are not produced until the fall. As it is a tree dense with branches, you might liken it to the tree of our ancestry, each of us flowers of the same tree, no matter how far apart we might be the further we are from the roots. Simply, the magnolia is a beautiful tree to me, making my heart smile and giving me hope at the end of a long, dark winter, though all is still barren I know spring is here, when I see the wild spectacle of a magnolia in full bloom. Both magnolia and the South are about abundance and growth, but of all things equally, for Nature is without judgment.

Well, in spite of having now written an essay I still have a feeling there’s something I’ve missed…

P.S. as far as I can discern, it was purely coincidental that the movie “Mississippi Burning” was shipped to me with a CD I ordered as a ‘cover’, and that Michael chose to watch it tonight… the South is trying to tell me something…