So many good emails.
So many inspiring messages.
So many invitations to deep connection phone and video calls.
So many harvests of important insights from such calls, messages, emails — I’m glad for them, for the way they stir soul. For the way that human beings can’t help but offer creativity.
A part of me wants to share them all in this blog. Perhaps in days to come, because I’m committed to offering Human to Human resources, wonderings, wanderings that invite myself and others to be in commitments of kindness, consciousness, and flow with life itself.
These CoVid Times are bringing forward so much good. Yet pain, grief, and fear also, right? It is quite a thing to live with an awareness that things will get worse, yet better — and that the meaning of these words, “worse” and “better” might evolve significantly in the coming days, weeks, and years. Well, perhaps this is part of the meta invitation of these times.
I’ll offer something a bit different today, a dream. Not an “I have a dream,” Martin Luther King Jr. style. It’s last night’s dream for me. From the sleeping night time, when the individual and collective subconscious has room to claim more of its voice. This dream came on the heals of a two hour men’s group zoom call, with a group of six of us, just before going to bed.
My orientation to dreamwork is not one of objectifying meaning. The human psyche gives us much wider horizon to cast our eyes and hearts upon. I’ll offer a snippet of my sense-making and how it relates to these waking life times for me. Please feel free to choose your detail and offer your sense-making and associative super power.
I am in a small and plain room with a man. It is mostly dark. The floor might be dirt. There is some natural light coming in through a window opening. This man is an advisor to me. We live in a time that feels like two-three millennia ago. The man is advising me about a snake that is on the ground floor in the room. I am walking in a circle watching the snake. It is crawling in a circle opposite me, watching me. The snake is 2-3 feet in length; it is about 1.5 inches in diameter. The snake is bright green, multicolored, tropical looking but this geography feels more Middle Eastern or Egyptian. This advisor is telling me to kill the snake, which seems to have more relevance than just what is happening in this small room. It seems to have relevance for a much bigger group of people. I keep walking in a circle, about six feet across from the snake’s crawl. I watch it. It watches me. The advisor is telling me to act upon the snake as if it doesn’t have any consciousness or awareness. But really, the snake is listening and taking in all of the words spoken and intended. I go to reach for the snake, which appears easy enough to do. But now the snake turns to a bright gold color. I think I’m acting upon it, which the snake seems to comprehend. To my surprise, it bites at my right hand and arm, which I shake rapidly to get it off. My fearful and surprised shaking only lasts a couple of seconds in which the snake disappears. It vanishes. I wake.
One of the more attention-catching details in this dream, sense-making for me, is the relationship to the snake. In the dream it seems that I’m acting upon the snake, but really that snake has higher… something. In waking life, I continue to sense that earth itself has higher… something, and that she is biting back to interrupt this false and rather pretentious assumption that humans can be in omnipotent control (or, pulled to the personal, that I can be in control of all of it).
Here’s to the insights that any of us are finding anew, in what feels like a time of required labor, and messy birth, yet perhaps blessed, in the end, with a few initiatory and awakening bites.