Dream Visitor

Fascinating dreams last night, strange, but not so unsettling as the night before. Doing yoga in a silent dawn, outside under the trees–this one happened at least twice. The main “problem” dream was this:

I look out the sliding glass door of the breezeway to see what looks like a cougar slipping through the grasses. When I get a better look at it, I can see tufty ears, like a lynx, and a golden spotted ruff, mane-like, on its shoulders. It’s taller, with thinner legs, proportionally, than a lynx, and almost wolf-like in shape.

I find it online by looking up maned wolf, and discover that there has been an escape of a young one (it isn’t actually a maned wolf–more feline) in the area. It comes up to me while I am in the garage, but I am too scared to let it approach (it is BIG), and I slip inside and close the door.

Later, I tell my friend about it and she says, “You should have welcomed it in. It needed your company.”

In my waking moments today, I looked up maned wolf and lynx, and it is nothing like either, but sort of a mishmash of the two. Come to think of it, it was very hyena-like, but the dream-memory keeps saying wolf-cougar-lynx. It’s a much better image to carry with me today than the previous night.


i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings;and of the gay
great happening ilimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any – lifted from the no
of all nothing – human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
―e. e. cummings, read at our wedding 27 years ago today
*
“To live a creative life,
we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
―Joseph Chilton Pearce
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“If music be the food of love, play on.” ―William Shakespeare
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“At the still point, there the dance is.” ―T.S. Eliot
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“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.” ―Leonard Bernstein
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“rebellion: playing streamside with my babies, teaching them and letting them teach me that water is alive” ―Natasha Alvarez


Gratitude List:
1. Twenty-seven good years married to Jon. I know that this is not something to take for granted.
2. Trinidadian cooking. Oh. My. Callaloo. We had a peanut drink, chicken corn soup with cassava, doubles (a spongy bread with chickpea stew), and a chicken stew with buss-up-shut (Trinidadian bread that you use to eat the stew much in the way you use injera in Ethiopian food).
3. All those monarchs yesterday! Must be migration.
4. Used book sale
5. Music chapel today: We have some incredibly talented students.

May we walk in Beauty!

Spirit Animal: Hyena

hyena1

Today’s poetry prompt is to write a Spirit Animal Poem.  I have spent some time over the years thinking about my connections to certain animals. Hyena is only one of many in my meditations, but she is perhaps rarely spoken of as a spirit animal. It’s time she gets her due:

Hyena
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Elusive as mist I slip
through the village
at midnight.

Eyes moon-bright,
I lope in the shadows
down the starry path
toward the river.

My night-song will wake you
with a tingle in your spine:
a bark, a laugh, a warning.

I defend your door from danger,
standing at the gates,
in the liminal spaces
between the village of your heart
and the river of your living.

Listen for the padding of my paws
in the darkness outside your window.
Watch for my shadow
to cross the moonlight
in your doorway.

Gratitude List:
1. The way a line of mist hung low over the River on our way home from school this afternoon.
2. Chocolate. I’m so glad the gods decided to share their food. I know dark chocolate is supposed to be the best, but I am really savoring Equal Exchange’s milk chocolate right now.
3. On All Souls Day, my blood ancestors, who put their lives and homes on the line for what they believed to be right.
4. The ancestors of this land where we live and walk and farm. The souls who hunted here, who traveled through, who may have lived on these hills.
5. The ones we’ve loved and lost, who’ve gone on before us.  May their memories bring comfort. May the stones of grief we carry turn light as bright and shining leaves.

May we walk in Beauty!