Every year at Solstice, I begin to watch my dreams very closely for images and ideas that might coalesce around a word or image that might become my theme for the coming year. This year’s theme was Embodiment, Magic, and Creativity, focusing on the word Embodiment. This year of Embodiment has been a doozy. I was attacked by parents at my school and ended up losing my job. My parents were both diagnosed with cancer and we nearly lost my dad. I got a new and incredibly satisfying job. I’ve learned to speak up for myself. My parents survived, my father almost miraculously. I’ve begun a new daily prayer practice which is fulfilling and connecting.

Part of me wants to kick 2022 out the door while yelling obscenities. Part of me wants to thank it for being a great teacher. Here I am on the first full day of a generous winter break with a little time to settle into the beginning of the process of year-end self-reflection, and looking forward to the future.

I am heading out soon for an over-due eye exam, perhaps my first word to put into the basket of consideration for the coming year should be Vision. Suddenly I have remembered that in last night’s dream, someone hands me a sheet of paper covered with exquisite drawings of eyes. I’m particularly caught by one eye with dark eye shadow and little white moons and stars along the upper lid.

In so many dreams throughout my life, I find hidden rooms in a house. I’ve always felt like it’s my Deep Self telling me that I am developing new inner capacity, or that I have inner resources that are not visible to everyone.

In Saturday night’s dream, I have been desperately trying to escape from people from a former job. A kind friend has been driving me all around the island, and we have managed to stay several minutes ahead of them, but they keep almost catching me.

Finally, I tell my friend to drop me off at my grandmother’s house. I grab my handful of special rings and quartz crystals and head through the first secret door. It’s in plain sight, but nobody ever seems to notice or go in there. Door after door, and stair after stair. Some moments when I’m almost discovered, but even then, there are more secret ways.

At one point, I accidentally come out of the secret part of the house into a library. I check out a book and tell the librarian to look out the window. When my pursuers ask where I went, he can honestly say he didn’t see where I went. I slip through a secret panel and back to safety.

I was so incredibly bothered when I woke up with how derelict the hidden rooms were. Sometimes when I dream secret rooms, they’re richly colored, with beds and couches and pillows, curtains and sparkling sun coming in the windows. The rooms in this dream were unfinished, filled with abandoned construction materials: wood and nails and broken things. Piled up by many of the doors were piles of filthy rags which people had dumped in there. There was a time this spring when I felt that someone had breached my spiritual spaces and dumped their garbage there. I have been expanding the safe zones inside myself since then, but perhaps this dream suggests that I need to get rid of the garbage that was dumped on me, create livable internal spaces, not just safe zones.

So I add Safe Space, Self-Preservation, and Moving In To My Self to the basket.

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Gratitude List:
1. A generous break
2. Walking with a friend
3. Making all the appointments–catching up with the self-care
4. Moving In To My Self
5. Vision
May we walk in Beauty!

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“Never miss an opportunity of noticing anything of beauty …” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“The incredible gift of the ordinary! Glory comes streaming from the table of daily life.” —Macrina Wiederkehr

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Never Broken

I am my own Home, now.
Wherever I move
the Light –
It moves with me.
I open all of the windows and the doors
so that God can come and go easily.
I don’t know why God takes such delight
in this House I call “Me.”
This place
where hearts come to be broken.
At the end of the Long Day I always ask.
“God? Why, hearts to be broken?”
And God always replies,
“Never broken, dear Lover—
only Opened.”
—Em Claire

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“Find the antidote in the venom.” —Rumi

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“Only two more days of the walk into the darkness. I am so grateful for the way the light kept finding me today. I’m not really on the edge, and I am not losing it, but I feel the edges of the panic, the sense of claustrophobia. I like the darkness. I love the inward-turn of winter, but always, at the edge, there’s the. . .well, the edge. So. There’s the Sun. And Stars and a growing Moon. And Mother Darkness. Comfort me. Disturb me.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider (from several years ago)

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“I wonder what Piglet is doing,“ thought Pooh.
“I wish I were there to be doing it, too.” ―A.A. Milne

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“People make meaning like bees make honey. Gathering experiences and images like bits of nectar and synthesizing it into something new, rich, and uniquely ours. Respect the meaning you make. The family you choose. The wisdom you craft, sweet and golden on your tongue.” —Jarod K. Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist