Cain and Chloe

It is November, and I am still unemployed. It is November, and there are 7 billion people on this planet. It is November, and snow already covers the ground. There is a ‘perfect storm’ of factors playing into our generation’s revival of small, intentional communities, and I feel the strong draw.

In our own community, we talk about Chris Martenson's Crash Course. It has become a frightening premonition for many of us, I think, and I myself had my first Crash Course-inspired nightmare the other night.

Martenson defines debt as a claim on future work. So, in my dream, China was collecting on its debt with human labor. The citizens of the United States were occupied in rotational work camps that, like seasonal immigration cycles, followed the country's weather patterns in agricultural and factorial work. Keith and I were separated from our dream children, who I remember very distinctly to have the names Cain and Chloe.

Because I have never considered those names for children, and because I love the idea of a collective consciousness accessible through dreams, I looked into these two names.

Chloe is Greek for "young green shoot", and Cain means "reed" in many traditions, or the hollow stem of a tall grass.

In Greek mythology, Chloe is raised by people that are not her parents and carried off by raiders from other nations. Fitting for a dream set in an occupied country. Separately, Chloe is another name for the Greek Goddess Demeter. To dream of Demeter, according to DreamMoods.com, is said to represent your maternal instinct and desire to provide for your dependents. You see, Demeter is the Goddess of the harvest, the fertility of the earth, and the seasons. She presides over the sanctity of marriage, the sacred law, and the cycle of life and death. I imagine it represents the part of me that is awakening to the limitations of the Earth and a growing anxiety of what awaits future generations.

In my mind, the name Cain immediately takes me to the story in Genesis. As Daniel Quinn tells the story, ancient Semitic herders would have heard the story of Cain killing Able to symbolize an old way of living being killed off to make way for the cultivation of the land. It is interesting that my growing awareness of environmental degradation as the crux of economic and political unworkability birthed a dream child named Cain.

I find it interesting that in my dream I had one child that was a green shoot, and another that was a hollow reed. I find it interesting that both have to do with a cultivation of the land. One embodies the fertility of the earth and the seasons, and upholds the sacred law of life and death. The other breaks that law and commits the first recorded murder, and it is more than the murder of a man; it marks the destruction of humanity's relationship with the natural order.