Today is the last day of Dreamtime. Tomorrow the light dawns. Tomorrow, I will look through the soup of dream-images from the past two weeks and choose the word for the year.
In last night’s dream, I am at a book sale, focusing on the books on the table in front of me. At one point, I become aware that a man facing me at the next table down has a face divided into two: his hair and beard on the left side of his face are white against his brown skin, and both hair and beard are closely trimmed. On the other side, his hair and beard are black and fuller, scruffier. When he faces toward the right side of the hall, he’s an older, white-haired man. When he faces the other direction, he’s younger. It’s like there’s a line down the middle of his face.
Looking around, I notice that everyone is standing in profile in relationship to me. I look down and then up again, and they’re all looking the opposite way, and they appear to be completely different people. Everyone has opposite faces! As I move faster around the room, they find it more difficult to keep only in profile to me, and the game is up. Everyone is two people. They all look toward me, and I can see the lines down the center of their faces where hair and beards and make-up are divided into two different sides. I find out someone’s been doing a social experiment. I figured it out pretty quickly.
Two-sided people, showing you two different sides to themselves.
I woke with a phrase from a song in my head, from a song they sang in chapel yesterday, something about “bringing all his sons to glory.” It really made me feel uncomfortable that young people are still singing and speaking in such patriarchal language. The music was beautiful, though, and the young woman leading the music was a former student with an absolutely angelic voice.
Gratitude List:
1. Books
2. Comfy jammies
3. Playing games with the family
4. The weekend
5. Warm showers
May we walk in Beauty!
Saturday’s Messages:
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” —e. e. cummings
“Again and again, our dreams demand leadership of us, calling our life’s vision forward into the world, step by tenderbrave step.
“The practice above all practices is to relinquish the immature desire to be taken care of (by our parents, spouse, government, guru, church, etc), and to parent our own originality. To give ourselves the support that we may never have received.
“To get behind the creation of one’s life is to recognize your influence in ‘the way things are,’ and nurture your vision with protective discipline until it is strong enough to serve in the world on its own.” ―Toko-pa Turner
“You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading. As a craft it’s acquired through the apprentice system, but you choose your own teachers. Sometimes they’re alive, sometimes dead.
“As a vocation, it involves the laying on of hands. You receive your vocation and in your turn you must pass it on. Perhaps you will do this only through your work, perhaps in other ways. Either way, you’re part of a community, the community of writers, the community of storytellers that stretches back through time to the beginning of human society.” ―Margaret Atwood
“We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say “It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.” Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.” ―Fred Rogers
“Good poetry, I think, is more about finding your way by signposts than about following a map. It gives readers a few cues and clues, sets us loose, and then waits for us to say, “Oh! I recognize this territory! I know this landscape.” A series of seemingly unrelated but compelling images can spring to life when sprinkled with the fairy dust of beautiful language or the hint of a story. While I want to be able to understand enough of the controlling idea of a poem for it help me create some sort of sense, the most satisfying meaning that I derive from reading a good poem comes not through the intellectual front door, but through the back door of the emotions. Meaning made through emotional connection rather than mental processing often appears in the form of wonder and holy surprise, even when it comes in a painful or angry guise. Poetic understanding is gut-level understanding. I have long been a fan of singer-songwriter Paul Simon. I don’t think I know what he means about anything, but he always makes me feel something.” ―Beth Weaver-Kreider, 2014
Mockingbird Chronicles 