Dream retreat

I am in the middle of a dream retreat. It is early in the morning and I am awake but the others are still dreaming. I do not remember my dreams except the presence of a dear friend in them.

This morning some dreams will be reported in great detail, some will be elusive images, and some will leave no trace in the memory but what will happen is this: the dreams will speak to each other and they will speak to us. We will be informed, entertained, instructed. Common themes will emerge in our dreams and we will be found in each other’s dreams. We will dream for each other. The images will unfold, reveal themselves as clever, compact stories in themselves. The detailed dramas will have surprising and unsurprising points to make

Already we have had one night of dreaming and this has happened. I have led this kind of retreat several times and it has always happened. The Dreamgiver is reliable. Ask together and you shall receive.

I only do this because of long experience and observation. When people gather in one place, things happen in their dreams. You don’t know this, of course, unless you report your dreams to each other. The thing to do is to start speaking of your dreams.

Years ago I began writing to a close friend who had moved away. Our correspondence had the immediacy of email and the detail of letters. We continued a practice we had started in person, talking about our dreams. After a few months of correspondence the letters became almost entirely about dreams because that is where the drama of our lives was playing out. And our dreams became intertwined, instructive and descriptive not only to us as individuals but to each other and then to the church community of which we were a part. And who knows, perhaps even to the world.

I have tried to write a book about this but the story is as elusive as a dream. I can’t quite do it justice. Meanwhile, however, it continues in many forms, not only with this friend but with other communities and individuals to whom we are connected. Powerful dreaming has been discovered, uncovered, and prompted in some way by our dream partnership and the way we have woven it into our lives and experience. But I wouldn’t say the two of us have caused anything to happen. Rather, we have tapped into something.

See, it’s elusive. It’s hard to describe. I can’t begin, in my favorite 500-word form, to do it justice.

But my current chapter in the story includes these dream retreats that I now offer to groups of trusted friends. (Trust is important because the boundaries between people are permeable when you dream together.)

On the first night of this retreat we requested the presence of the feminine Divine and she came, believe me, she came. One by one my friends are now waking up and we prepare to break the silence of the night with a report of the second installment of our dreams.

The single image I retained from my dreams of the first night says it all: it was of a curtain of snow, with points here and there as if beings on the other side were trying to poke through.

The veil is thin. The Divine tries to get through. Dreams, when our defenses and boundaries are down, offer access.

War dreams

I dream of seeing an article I wrote years ago for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reprinted in a bland church magazine. (I really worked there, I didn’t write an article like this.) It is accompanied by black-and-white photos. It is about war and Russia. Everything is grayed, faded—the typeface, the photos. The clearest, most dramatic, least faded photo is of soldiers’ legs and feet, in rough boots. 

The dream wakes me at 4 30 and I can't get back to sleep. I come downstairs and make tea, read the online NYTimes. I come across this article: "Face that Screamed War's Pain Looks Back, 6 Hard Years Later." It is about an Iraqi girl who was photographed in 2007 as an agonized 5-year-old after her parents had been shot by American soldiers. She was seeing the photo for the first time at age 12. 


That event was not the end of her suffering. Her brother was killed in an attack on the house 3 years later. She is no longer in school. She is beautiful and sad now in her long red dress.

 

This photo was not as widely published as the photo of the napalm-drenched child in Vietnam. At least I never saw it. The photographer who took the iconic picture was dis-embedded, banned from the unit he’d been covering after the picture was published. He was recently killed on the front lines in Libya.

I wonder about my dream, the faded gray of my passion against war, my passion to understand it, to understand Russia--the enemy--juxtaposed to the full-color terror of a young orphan. Her terror has faded, too, sunk to depression, an inability to focus on school though she vaguely wishes to become a doctor someday. She now dreams, she says, of her dead mother, father, brother.

Jon Stewart went serious for a few minutes the other night and said yes we should see the photos of the dead Bin Laden, but only if we also were allowed to see photos of all the dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, our own and the others. We are under a shameful censorship.

If we had seen, would we have put up with these wars for ten years???? (I refrain from inserting obscenities.)

I have no wisdom to offer, nothing to say, really.

The leaves unfold in the spring woods. Is that a wood duck I see perched on a tree trunk? A pair visits every spring, looking for a nesting place. Every spring they realize that there is no water nearby, so, despite the lovely holes in some tall trees, this is not prime wood duck real estate.

Life goes on but death goes on, too, at our collective hands. I am sad. I am angry. My anger is gray and it will fade. I don’t know what to do. I pray.

No trespassing

The shoreline below the sawtooth outline of the ridge embracing the cove is glassy, the rest of the pale waters only lightly ruffled. I lounge on the window seat next to a bay window at dawn, keeping an eye out for migrating gray whales, but this morning there are no spouts, no bow waves.

An apple tree in the narrow front lawn leans toward the cove. The lawn itself ends abruptly in a tangle of vegetation that falls down several hundred feet to the water’s edge. I can’t see the shore below the house but I know from the signs posted at the edge of the tangle and the repeated rules emailed to us and posted in the mansion that we are not allowed to descend here to the water’s edge. Private property lines are strictly enforced. No permission to hike through boundaries.

The eight of us, all responsible, rule-abiding adults, feel slightly insulted by the strict rules that prevent us from crossing over into the neighbors’ property in order to take “their” steps down to the water. We would not pick the flowers and we would not throw down trash and we would not yell and cavort.

But visitors like us are mistrusted, I suppose for good reason. Americans are trained in “to each his own” and not how to behave as good commoners. Some of us foul and wreck what does not belong to us personally. And some of us who enrich ourselves pay little heed to that which enriches all of us. We carve up and subdivide the great natural sweeps of gorgeous earth into small fiefdoms, preferring the small beauty we can own to a larger beauty that we must share.

The brother-in-law who made the arrangements to rent this elegant mansion on an island in Washington’s lace of waterways was interviewed by phone before the deal was settled. Who would be coming, did we smoke, were there any children, where were we coming from, and on and on. In the absence of trust, and common, culturally enforced assumptions about how to behave on other people’s private property, let alone any sense of the commons, we must feel each other out. Usually we sort ourselves out through money. If you can afford to live here you should know how to behave. As for renters and other visitors—well, it’s impossible to jack up prices high enough to exclude riffraff, especially for a group who is sharing expenses. Hence the interview.

In the UK it is possible to hike across the entire country, off road, because of the ancient culture of the commons. Paths cross private pastures, stiles and gates are strategically placed to keep sheep in their proper places and allow people to pass through. Hikers are expected to know how to behave and, I take it, they usually do.

Here, only the crows and bunnies get to trespass.

The joys of quitting

I am a quitter. Yesterday I dropped out of an online writing course for which I’d paid good money. Today I am removing one of those commitment bracelets I’ve been wearing for the last few weeks. I do this often, sign on for something in a fit of hope and enthusiasm and then change my mind when I realize that the enthusiasm was temporary and that the hope is likely to remain unfulfilled.

I’m puzzled about this tendency I have, how easily I give up. I’ve observed it over the years and noticed that it usually happens around very personal commitments, my resolve to be different, to improve, to fulfill my closely held desires. I am not fickle about commitments to group enterprises, to the community. I keep my promises to others but not to myself.

For example, I have just put together an entire new website (not quite public yet) on a topic that is not my favorite thing in the world to talk about and write about—cumulative impacts: the fact that harm adds up in the world, in communities, in our own bodies, and the harm comes from many sources. Yet our laws, regulatory systems, and ways of doing science fail to take this into account. In service to a dedicated corps of policymakers and community activists and theorists who are trying to change this, I have put together this website, figured out a snazzy search system, worked with designers and programming nerds, honed the descriptions and concepts, and got the job done. It is not my favorite topic or my favorite kind of job and yet I believe the website will perform a valuable service, I have the skills to do it, and so I have done it. And it gives me satisfaction.

And I just wrote an article for publication on the CongoCloth Connection, which was not my idea though I approve of it highly. I will get it published. It will do an important service. As I did this, I dropped into oblivion an idea I came up with, in the ditched online writing course, for an article on age-related hearing loss. I let go so easily of my own idea. It didn’t seem that important.

I have often chided myself for this tendency and others have confirmed my sense that truly, I need to stop effacing my own desires and give them priority. But, as with all my personal traits that seem to persist, I’m taking another look at it. I may keep trying to change, I may assert my own desires and agenda more forcefully, but I have a feeling that it will always be a struggle.

On the other hand what, really, is wrong with being essentially a team player? I enjoy being part of other people’s success, I enjoy making them successful, I enjoy the essence of community—everybody takes part and makes something bigger and better and sweeter than any one of us could imagine. I enjoy helping and I don’t particularly need to take credit. Sometimes I wonder why I am more often the helper than the one who is helped. But it doesn’t matter enough to try all that hard to change this fact.

I dropped the writing course because I have a whole string of communal and family activities coming up and I wanted to enjoy them fully without having the dark cloud of weekly “assignments” hanging over my head. And I took off the issue bracelet because I realized that I was never going to become a more gung-ho activist and persuader than I already am.

And this blog is proof that sometimes I actually do write my own stuff, about what I jolly well please.

A sacred weekend

I am trying to clear my desk before a sacred weekend. Earth Day and Good Friday coincide this year, and we will celebrate Easter with two baptisms in the family. That’s a lot of holy time, with emotional pulls in many directions. Plus cooking.

Right now six men are tromping up and down stairs, drilling holes in the attic, and blowing in an extra batch of insulation so it’s extra hard to complete my tasks. I’ll just give up and muse for a bit.

I want to make an Earth Day reading recommendation. Read here what I have to say about my friend Sandra Steingraber’s latest book, Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis. Okay I’ll tell you what I say. “This is a very funny book about hair-raisingly serious topics.” Read the book to identify with a mom who knows way too much about a poisonous world, who does all she can but doesn’t want to be a HEPA filter. Read it to find out how heroic it is to mow your lawn with a push mower or dry your clothes on the line.

(I gaze with some satisfaction at two racks of laundry crowding my study. Sun is shining today for a change so maybe I’ll just fold those dry clothes right now, take the racks outside, and put a load of sheets on them. Real April smell, no chemical fragrances needed.)

Jesus was put in the Earth, entombed in the obdurate stone. Death is essential. Nothing, however, is unchanging. Even the great plates of the Earth groan and tremble and shift. Humans build as if we will last forever and at the same time we create permanent poisons, no-trespass zones that will last tens of thousands of years.

Easter brings a happy ending but it is not an easy one. The message of the resurrection is a fierce challenge to be life, to bring life, to serve life and reject the forces of hatred, poison, and destruction.

May everything we do this sacred weekend, whether it is picking up trash on the roadway, hiding Easter eggs, or dipping in glorious ritual in a cold lake, honor the Spirit who breathes life.

Beware, essence at work

I am supposed to be sleeping in my daughter’s guest room but here I am, wide awake in the middle of the night. Although I often have a wakeful period this is an extreme case. I feel like I could start my day. Or even . . . write. It is 2 50 a.m. I think I have to blame the essence I snuck before going to bed.

Explain “essence.” You may be familiar with Bach Flower Essences. That is sort of the commercialized version. Essences are the distilled energies of plants and places that contain particular qualities those beings are willing to share with people. This bedroom recently became a storage place for several hundred little blue bottles of essences, gathered by a gifted Ann Arbor herbalist, which my daughter and son-in-law use in their practices for healing and guidance.

I have slept in this room before and it feels different since the essences have been brought here. It feels a little zingy, vibrant. My first night here I slept really, really well. Then last night before I went to bed I randomly chose an essence and swallowed a few drops. Randomly, but I think the choice of essences is never entirely random. They present themselves. One has the sense that they are allies, offering help.

My selection was December Primrose: “goals, vision.”  I can use that. I’ve been a little aimless recently, starting things and not finishing them. I have new enthusiasms (like this blog) but I don’t trust them. I’m afraid I’ll lose heart. One of my new enthusiasms is online writing courses. I’m on my second and I paid serious money for this one so I feel like something should come of it, but I’m doing it mostly to keep myself going until I figure out whether I want to start a bigger writing project and if so, what. I love these 500-word blog chats. Maybe this is it. Maybe not. I’m playing with writing and that feels good. Not so serious. Really, “goals” are perhaps too serious for me right now but nevertheless, the December Primrose presented itself.

So what happened was I dreamed that the semester had ended at the end of last year and here it was, April, and I was still trying to finish the final paper for a course. I was determined to do it but it was one of those dream-tasks that is impossible to accomplish while you are asleep so of course it is very frustrating and you just can’t get the dream finished. This is what woke me up at 2 30. Thanks a lot.

I have not remembered dreams in weeks though I’ve had a sense that I’ve been dreaming things I’d rather not remember. And this dream seemed like it gathered the sense of those dreams and made it so clear that I can’t help remembering. Yes, I’m overdue as a writer. Running out of time to be a serious writer if that’s what I want to be. I’m not sure I do.

What’s the message of the dream and should I heed it?

I don’t need to wonder about that because as soon as I woke and rehearsed the dream, I got an idea for a longer piece that I want to write. That is what popped me wide awake at 2:30 a.m. So yes, thank you, December Primrose. I now have a goal.

First bike ride

The first bike ride of the season is like the first day of school. I face it with a mixture of anticipation and dread, mostly dread.

Spring has been late but today is lovely, my work is done, and I have no excuses. It’s time to take to the hills. Sunday afternoon it was really warm and Vic and I planned to go for a ride. But he had to finish something on his computer as he always does so I started cleaning the porch and then it got really hot, maybe 85, and windy, and I was tired by the time the porch was clean so that was that.

I don’t know why it’s hard to start the biking season. Maybe because I know the first ride is going to be hard. My knees will ache, my butt will kill, I’ll huff and puff up the hills, I’ll have to avoid an entirely new set of patches and potholes.

Then there’s the matter of finding the gear, nothing new and spiffy like the new plaid dress and box of number 2 pencils that used to go with the first day of school, just stuff scattered by the forces of entropy that reign in closets and garages. Pull the biking shorts over the bulges, dig out a long-sleeved tee because it’s sunny but only 55, extract the helmet from the back of the coat closet shelf. And why is there only one bike shoe on the rack? And where is my favorite water bottle?

My little blue hybrid has been languishing in the garage for months. Doing nothing, her tires have managed to lose pounds and pounds. I wish I could say the same for myself. I pump her up. We roll carefully down the drive, swing out onto the road and down and up the first hills.

By the time we round the corner onto Oak Forest, I remember why I bike. Wind and sun on my face, brand new green grass and the first leaflings on trees. The hills aren’t so bad; I get up them with a few gears to spare. I glimpse migrating ducks on the marshy pond across the stateline but I’m going downhill too fast to stop and look. For most of the ride, though, I take my time. I pushed myself enough just to get this start on the biking season.

I promised myself a few months ago, when it was all hypothetical, that I would train for a century this year. That’s a 100-mile bike ride in a day. I’ve done two but not for a while. The late September Apple Cider Century winds through our neighborhood. It is, in fact, how we discovered this woods-farm-orchard-vineyard territory of southwest Michigan some 20 years ago.

I’m not saying one way or another, not yet. I’ve got 5 months. I’ve just done my first 10 miles. My butt is sore but not as sore as it will be after my second ride because it takes a good week to acquire the necessary numbness. It takes many miles a week to toughen the legs and the willpower. But once you start rolling it isn’t bad at all, not at all.