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gorilla dreaming

I have always dreamt of wild animals and the story is always the same.  I have the responsibility/honor of housing a truly wild animal, something big & far beyond my capacity to control with my physical strength, usually a big cat, almost without fail a tiger.  In these dreams, I have a very tenuous relationship with the feral creature, which means IF I pay attention & allow my energies to mesh with the creature, then they will both stay close to me AND not hurt anyone else.  It is never clear what will happen if I stop paying attention but I do obsess over harm to other people, people wandering, even half asleep, in the predictability of their everyday lives & unexpectedly running into across a ferocious feline, hungry & disoriented.

The other day Amalia & I stayed too long at the beach.  Two Mediterannean girls on the first really gorgeous day of summer, we laid close to the waves & alternately slept & gossiped & read fashion magazines & snacked.  It was way too late when we started to feel the burn, but being the gypsy beings we are, we enjoyed the refugee feeling of straggling home on the subway, sandy & a little forlorn. 

Night fell in Red Hook & we pulled the futon out into the middle of the loft, lit candles, made a little avocado & tomato salad with some popcorn & settled back to watch VICKY CHRISTINA BARCELONA on iTunes . . The Love Artist (of course) fell asleep immediately, or at least an half hour after drooling over Javier Bardem's droopy eyes & Penelope Cruz's gorgeous screaming & ranting . .

I began to dream, a loopy lucid dream that involved a very emotionally present gorilla.  Now, I have never dreamt or even briefly fantasized about a gorilla, they are not in my repetoire.  But the scenario was familiar: a huge, powerful & potentially dangerous creature left in my care.  In my dream (as in real life) I was so so so tired, I could barely keep my eyes open.  But how to care for my ward while I slept?

I had the idea (as many mothers have had) that if we fell asleep together, perhaps this would sooth my wild animal & keep him close to me.  I took him in my arms & laid his head against my chest.  LET ME REMIND YOU OF THIS: the dream was so real which means the gorilla was BIG, SMELLY, HAIRY.  Big like bigger than me.  I could telepathically feel how happy the gorilla was.  This is what he wanted.  It was extraordinarily deep, his contentment, his serenity went to the core of the earth & certainly to the core of my being.  I felt him letting go, surrendering to sleep.  I felt him in love with me.

As this slumber process happened, he became heavier & heavier in his letting go.  I was becoming one with him and then I panicked.  Too much: too much hair, too much gorilla, too much . . . love . . . .

I woke him & tried to get him to sleep on the floor.  He kept climbing back into the bed.  He became full of despair.  He became frustrated, angry.  Suddenly I was in danger.

As is the case with lucid dreaming, wakefulness was so close.  I could barely see Amalia sitting at the computer in the dark next to me.  I was dreaming & telling her of the dream at the same time.  I snapped the dream & woke up & stared out into a thunderstorm.

 

hindsight is 20/20 pt 2

(found image)

I have a hard time with dusk, unless it is summer, which of course then it becomes one of my favorite times.

I had no choice in being led out onto the hill in the early evening for my vision quest. My prayer for this ceremony was to release fear in much of the same epiphany I had been able to find before, releasing many things precious to me that no longer worked. It was clear that a certain kind of fear was no longer necessary, not an option.  I could ask for help to leave this addictive substance, the terror of being alone, behind moment by moment, day by day, just as I had asked for and received help with the other sticky, emotional parts of my life.  When I was left alone, by my sleeping bag, to lay raw on the ground in the growing dark, I took a deep breath and climbed in.  I laid on my back for a while and stared at the stars.  Fortunately I hadn’t sleep much the night before, so I was incredibly tired.  I fell asleep easily.

I woke up later, just before the rain came, and looked into the stars again.  I was still on my back.  I hadn’t moved.  I was caught unawares by own softness and surrender.  Before I could complain or shudder at the immensity of my pledge, I breathed the night deeply into my lungs.  There was a sound all around me, deeper than a rumble, almost like the OMMMMM that I was so familiar with but even deeper, beyond alliteration, beyond forming.  I was a child without fear and I felt a loving presence  This was the beginning of my vision.  “She is here,” I heard the night say to the other spirits hanging their faces over me.

hindsight is 20/20

I cried on the path back to the fire in a way I have not cried in ceremony before. 

Thank you Creator, thank you my brothers and sisters, for letting me walk in these ways.

There is nothing like the feeling of when they come to retrieve you from your vision quest.  Since you can’t tell what time it is exactly, as you are left literally to your own devices, you must look at the sky and try to remember what time the sun comes up, then try and remember approximately when it is that the sun goes down and divide those hours by the arc of the sky, so that you can estimate the middle of the day.  This is a good guess, your own private sundial.  Then you must interpret when it is that you think they might come for you, the people who brought you out here, who “put you up on the hill.” Usually there has been some kind of hint but, but on the 5th day without food and water, it is often hard to remember.  It is not that your guides are trying to hide anything from you, or that part of the vision retrieval is that you must be punished into an utter loss of control. 

Your sponsors, friends and family are there to help you.  They, the ones who are praying for you, the ones who are back at base camp eating for you, they are there with your best intentions at heart, they are thinking about you all the time.  It is just that the world you are living in once you surrender to the elements, once you enter the spirit world and become truly wankan, is so completely removed from those who are caring for you ~ you could be continents, planets, away ~ that after this time distant from everything you know, everything that keeps you safe, you forget what it must be like to sleep inside, eat food, drink water.  You do not know how they think, back there, at home.  So you strain to remember, way back when, what exactly their words were when they left you out here.

second morning

 

fourth morning

 

 

the window

I am hobbling back slowly from my vision quest.  I know it was two weeks ago.  It has just been so delicious to be at least semi-silent, padding around in my little house, inbetween some spectacular praying in the tipi, ooh la la, some spectacular rattling and singing & some spectacular turning-your -heart-inside-out-just-to-get-more-surface-area & some spectacular no-reason-to-say-no-to-love-EVER going on in the tipis & just in the everyday of being me (& in feeling like you are so very much me too, you all should be feeling pretty good too, by now).

The crazy thing about all of this is the flipside of feeling so connected & one with everything is that sometimes I don't feel so good, cause I get scared this feeling is going to go.  I mean, be honest, have you ever broken up with someone that you really really loved, only so you wouldn't have to go through the pain of having them leave you? Be honest.  Well, it is a little bit like that . . . I wake up sometimes in the morning, imagining how I would feel if I didn't feel connected to anything, if I didn't feel rooted in the chain of love . . if I just disappeared into the sea or night . . . 

I can get myself all worked up into that.  I have had my girls so close to me in the last weeks in the tipi, sitting right next to me (I mean who gets to do that? like all the time?) but then when it gets time to leave them and go home, I can get myself crazed in a heartbeat, that somehow, insanely, I am alone . . .

So yesterday I was looking out my kitchen window at the garden next door, which is where I have been praying lately, staring into the green & the flowers and I realized that if I really believed that I was never alone and if I really believed that I would be shown what my work was, on a daily basis, that I have been shown what my work is all along, then all I need to do is show up for that (joyfully would work) and do what needs to be done & be grateful, hmmm, well that makes everything quite simple & NO MORE THINKING REQUIRED, SO DON'T WASTE YOUR ENERGY

I looked down & realized that during this series of thoughts, this prayer, my right hand had opened flat on the window sill where before it had been clenched. I pressed down into the wood like something magic was in the center of my palm, hidden there all along.

nola made me an apron for mother's day

love amnesia / vision quest

 

I just want to tell you that I love you & that I want you to think of me in the next days.

Yesterday I was driving Nola home from a complicated and awe-inspiring afternoon communing with everything from star beings to singing blades of grass.  Let's just say we learned a few new songs, songs that wrapped around your head & then took the elevator down a few levels & then up rapidly with a jolt, kind of like the elevator in INCEPTION, and then you thought you might have died and been reborn and then you realize it is still the same song.  It was a day like that. Some things are hard to understand, never mind explain.  But let us just say it was a very lucky, blessed day.  Some hard work. 

So anyway, I was driving her home & on the side of the road we see a huge hawk, laying there, perfect on the side of the road, regal, impeccable.  I have picked up dead hawks before but they were always pretty far gone & tiny.  This bird was a king or a queen and I could still feel the life force in him, in my hands and all around me, although h/she was clearly dead.  I fell to my knees so overwhelmed by the magnitude of this energy field swarming around both of us. It was so humbling. It reminded me of several other moments in the last few months, where I attempted to look into immensity, or was called to look into it.  It made me feel like I am being pulled through a sieve, the possiblity of an enormous, faster than the speed of light, system upgrade on a cellular level, that hurts in all of my bones, like moving through a tesseract, breaking down to the infinite & being reformed.

I am aware that many of you will not understand what I am talking about.

I was told recently at dinner, to stop talking about "the shift" please.

I have so much to tell you about & I will.

I am about to leave in a minute for my third vision quest.  4 days in the woods alone.  Character building.  I have that falling in love amnesia about this kind of high stamina, scary business. I think it is going to be so much fun, til the night before, laying in my bed, with the heat on, hearing the raindrops on the skylight. 

I've been up since 2 am.

This is me two years ago on my first vision quest.

(vision quest 2009)

 

I have no idea what I was singing, since at that time, I was afraid to sing.  I had no voice in prayer. Now you can't stop me.  This is why it is worth it to go out into the woods and not eat or drink water & sit up all night in the dark and pray.  You find yourself and then you find yourself some more.  It's crazy that I'm scared this time (& I am really scared). I am so much stronger than when I started, but I think more I grow up, the more real I get, the more I look into immensity . . okay maybe it is just humility, but it still puts my heart, not in my throat but my mouth, no more like right behind my eyeballs.

 

 

(vision quest 2009)