Seeds of Old Trees

DREAMBIT: I was in someone else’s home or building and saw out the window in the hallway with saffron yellow carpet that there were these trees outside. At first I thought they were those trees with the black serpentine seed pods which I harvested a few days ago outside Grampa’s apartment building, then I saw that they were walnut-like seeds or fruits, but bigger with a rougher looking shell. A man came walking by so I asked him what the tree was. He said it was a ‘knot’ or ‘knod’ tree. For some reason I couldn’t hear him that well. I also had the feeling that I came in the back way, up the back stairs.

DREAMWORK:

This is a place I haven’t come to own yet, even though it is already a part of me, a place with saffron yellow carpet in the hallway. This is the second or third dream with this particular colour, one of my favourites, and one that I associate with spiritual aspirations. I suppose it is my own version of the yellow-brick road… perhaps to enlightenment?? So this is a house of spirituality to me, but I came in from the back, which makes it also the second or third dream involving the back way. Instead of coming in the front door, the normal, conventional way, I chose the path less trodden. The back way implies sneakiness also, when you don’t want to be seen or recognized, though I did not have the sense of that in the dream. Why did I come in the back then? I came in the back way so as to avoid public scrutiny and judgment, from society, from my family and peers, friends and colleagues when I had them. I just want to do my own thing and not be obstructed or influenced by others around me. I am still marching to my own drums, but perhaps one day I will find my band.

The light is a bit dim in the dream, so some of this is unclear, unrevealed, to me as of yet. But I am in the House of Spirit, on the second floor, though the saffron yellow hallway was ever so slightly declining, like a ramp, suggesting perhaps that there are still small ups and downs in my path ahead.

Outisde, in nature, was these trees with the strange fruits that really captured my attention. In waking life I had found these twisted black seed pods last Saturday and collected a few. To the best of my knowledge I believe they were honey locust trees. I am fascinated by their shape – serpentine instead of straight, or slightly arced like the seed pod rattle I bought in Mexico. These make great rattles too, except you’ll need a bunch of them together to produce enough sound. I guess i’ve become very drawn to the tactility, variety and beauty of nature lately, and sometimes I feel like a little child who could play with stones, seed pods, leaves, and berries for hours, as if they are the crown jewels of my kingdom.

Seeds are potentials for the future, possibilities of what is to come, genetically coded by nature. In the dream it was somehow a matter of urgency for me to know what kind of tree the seeds were growing on, my desire to know the origin, my origin, and the name of my forebearers. It wasn’t trees of the black serpentine pods, but ones with a husk or shell that looked like weather-roughened wood. A seed, with new life unborn, yet ancient.

‘Knod’ is not a word I know, but apparently is a variant of the word ‘knot’, according to the Dictionary of English Etymology, imparting to me a sense of evolution, change over time. I had trouble hearing what the man said, as if the sound was distorted or muffled, so perhaps it is not time for me to know yet. But maybe I could be permitted to explore a little… ‘Knot’ on a tree is like a scab or a scar, which grows over the spot where a branch used to be. It is a sign of healing, literally. Seeds from a tree that has experienced the loss of a limb(s) and healed—a wounded healer—bear imprints of that experience and the wisdom from healing, an ancient and inherent wisdom, the wisdom of nature. I have within me that wisdom too, for I too am a seed from the great tree of life.

But what I needed to be reminded of is that a tree has roots, and a big tree has long roots. I have been unaware and consciously disconnected from my own roots for most of my life, even now the idea of roots and ancestors feel barely within my grasp. Seeds are the future, roots are the past. Both are essential to life, my life.

What’s old, weathered, wise, and traditional has been figuring more and more prominently in both my waking and dreaming life lately. Perhaps this is the healing of another kind of split in me, the past and the future, meeting and mending in the present. I, who has had her roots lopped off by christian beliefs 3 generations back, am now harking back to the most ancient of spirituality of my lineage, the Dao, the oldest of my roots. Perhaps this is how I am coming to it, through the back way.