3 dreams

In the first, Keith and i, aware of an impending tidal wave, sought out a room in the top floor of the highest building. There with others, we sat in false calm. i saw out the window, towering above the building, the white crest of the imminent flood contrasting against the dark night sky. A gasp escaped my throat, alerting the others, for which I felt guilty. I held a young boy in my lap and used all my will to convey a sense of calm as I pet his hair and kissed his forehead. With a loud roar and a blinding flash of fear, I braced myself for the hit.

In the second, our community of friends fell into some conflict and Keith and I seemed to draw out the unabashed contempt of others.

In the third, I saw a skunk approaching me. I was lying on my back and instinctively tried to curl into a ball to make myself unknown. As it came closer, I tried to block it from me with my feet. The skunk attempted to break through and come closer so I tried gently nudging it away with my toes. The simple gesture incited a violent reaction, and the skunk began to bight and claw at my feet.

DreamMoods.com/DreamDictionary

Tidal Wave
To see a tidal wave in your dream represents an overwhelming emotional issue that demands your attention. You may have been keeping your feelings and negative emotions bottled up inside for too long. On a positive note, the tidal wave symbolizes the clearing away of old habits. If you are carried away by the tidal wave, then it means that you are ready to make a brand new start in a new place.

Children

To save a child in your dream signifies your attempts to save a part of yourself from being destroyed.

Skunk
To see a skunk in your dream suggests that you are driving people away or turning them off. Alternatively, the dream indicates that your suppressed anger is on the verge of exploding. You are not expressing your true feelings even though you do not agree with a decision.

Simply Occult

I was talking with my good friend Joy the other day about the wisdom of stay-at-home parents. She sent me this excerpt from a Wendell Berry Essay:

"Later in her book, Davis speaks of the wisdom of the 'valorous woman' of Proverbs 31 as a 'kind of intelligence bred through generations of work done in particular places, with particular materials, in response to concrete and immediate problems.' This articulate, humble, practical local intelligence is antithetical to imperial rule, and it is the only effective way of resistance:

The logic of empire is the centralization of information and social control; its essential processes are acculturation of local populations and appropriation of goods. Local knowledge, however, is difficult to control, since it is by definition dispersed and relatively autonomous. Nor can it be appropriated from without; [it] can be learned only from inside the community."

What really grabbed me, and I think my friend, was the truth that women, who have traditionally stayed at home and been kept at bay from academia and the wisdom of the professional world, held within them all this time a 'practical and local intelligence'. While society has deemed this state of home-bound living a pitiable weakness and vulnerability, we have the opportunity to reclaim its value, not within the bounds of empire, but as a counter imperium of autonomous rule!

In our ambitions of forming an intentional community, many of our friends have exchanged formal education and master's degrees for hours of personal study trying to reclaim that knowledge that responds to concrete and immediate needs: food, water, shelter, and health. That journey has led many of us to greater intimacy with the world, the seasons, the streams, the plants and predators and prey, new-found brothers and sisters of equal worth and countless wisdom. We seek out the wild places. We study plants and herbs for their healing and nutritional properties. And that's when it hit me: the image of Joy chanting in a tiny little home in the middle of nowhere, or Luke talking to himself or performing ceremonies alone in the woods, or Kate throwing different plants into a pot brewing up some cure for aches and pains...suddenly I saw my group of friends as a coven of witches!

While in the past I have dismissed witches as satanic and scary, I am now drawn to them as symbols of anti-empirical knowledge and feminine power. I am not talking about the religious movement Wicca, though I would not dismiss its aspects of Pantheism. I am talking about a story I have been told since I was a little girl. Look at the definitions of a witch in dictionaries: someone with supernatural powers; an ugly old woman; a seductive young woman; an herbalist. I am talking about a campaign against the greatest threat to the empire: local knowledge. This campaign slanders feminine/local power and wisdom. I am talking about the occult, or knowledge of the 'hidden', as opposed to knowledge of the measurable, or science. I am talking about that which society condemns. It's weird to live in the middle of no where. It's weird to throw plants into a pot and make your own potions. It's weird to join with nature in ceremony. It's weird to live independently of the empire.

And I like it.

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.

The Great Escape

I am drawn to Donald Kraybill’s concept of an upside down Kingdom, or Pema Chodron’s visual image of spiritual journeys taking us down rather than up mountains. I like the idea of becoming less. But I see one problem with that – I am a woman. And I have been raised to see my value in lessening myself. As I feel this desire to readjust my focus on power and success, I am painfully sensitive to the subtle coercion of a sexist society in this possibly-less-than-innate desire.

I have written before about how I feel torn. On the one hand, I want to nurture my professional talents and pursue political change as a social worker on a grand scale. On the other hand, I want to reconnect with the land and spend my days farming with an intentional community of friends. Why these two are at odds has been difficult to express, but having spent the summer out of school, I feel myself leaning heavily towards the latter.

Without graduate studies, I have found time to make a solar oven that, after a few adjustments, was able to cook rice and cookies (not together). I’ve started washing my clothes by plunger saving water and electricity, and building killer forearms. I garden. I cut grass with a push mower. I can peaches and salsa. I’m pretty much the coolest person there is by the standards of my social circles. Unemployed this summer (also popular amidst my social circles), I have found that these money and earth saving techniques are, in fact, a job in themselves. And I like the work. I enjoy sweating while mowing the grass, and then dipping my hands into a water bucket to wash clothes. I like my sun-slobbered skin more than freezing in an office in August. I like having dirt under my finger nails way better than paper cuts. And I feel good, saving the planet, saving money, being creative, being healthy, and reconnecting with my body and the earth.

As my friends bear children, this draw to ‘natural’ living is more intense. I still avoid child bearing like the plague, but suddenly I am drawn to the idea of being a stay at home mom, literally making a living with the every day tasks of frugality and preservation. Breast feeding – what an incredible concept! Not only are you bonding with your child, using your body to provide them with the sustenance they need, but it’s free to boot! I also enjoy the concept of cloth diapers. Use and reuse the same twenty diapers, day after day, child after child. No waste except, of course, what fills the diapers in the first place.

And yet I recognize that everything I have come to love about tending a home and raising children is a slap in the face to feminist advocates who have worked so hard to create ways to help women escape the bondage of work at home.

My resentment of authoritarian obstetricians is not new. They generate incredible lists of no-no’s for pregnant women. No cats, no caffeine, no aspirin, no alcohol, no fish, no raw milk, no fluid from hotdog packages, no bologna, no herbal teas, no pesto, no canned or prepackaged foods, no soft cheeses, no diet soda, no pineapple, no sesame seeds, and, of course, no stress. Some of us already avoid aspirin and caffeine as much as we avoid cat litter and the fluid from hotdog packages. But the underlying message that irritates me is that we suddenly acquire some value as the incubator for a child that might come out male; that every detail of our lives carries the responsibility of a child's health; that women hold the burden of blame, but very little power.

My understanding of feminism to this point has been reconnecting with the positives of femininity. Recognizing our connection to the earth in our cycles in a way that I do not think men are able. But another way to say that is 'embracing the inevitability of biology'. I am less comfortable with that definition. I felt a certain empowerment in the concept of breastfeeding, yet choosing to breastfeed would severely limit me in other roles and identities. Baby formula, disposable diapers, and tiny glass jars of mush bananas were a huge step in getting women out of the home and keeping them employed. Everything that has helped free women’s time for careers seems to run contrary to the environmental movement and earth-bound feminism I am swept up in.

I was glad to run across excerpts from Badinter’s “Le Conflit” which put words to my emotions. She says that “a movement dressed in the guise of a modern, moral cause that worships all things natural…drives independent and accomplished women out of the world and the workplace and into the house, where they will presumably squander their best, and most sexually interesting, years in unremitting slavery to their babies.” She goes on to say that, “They have been told to love those sacrifices as much as they may (or may not) love their babies, and to give themselves over to the jouissance – “orgasm” would be my translation – of intimacy with the little one who, in place of their husband or lover, will be sharing their bed for at least three years”.

So this is where I am stuck – do I aspire to the pressures of hard work at home without the pay, power, or prestige of male counterparts? Or do I aspire to the pressures of feeding a labor force and economy based on planned obsolescence? Or do I follow the path of many women and do both, stretching myself incredibly thin in dominating/submitting to both?

UFO's Abound

I awoke this morning from the static of a dozen unidentified flying objects outside my window.

Chirping and tweeting. Searching for love and, hopefully, picking tics out of my backyard.

I'm familiar with some birds.

The vultures that crash through the uppermost branches in the pine trees outside my front door are anything but inconspicuous.

I can spot a mallard.
If I weren't blogging, I'd call it a duck.
I heard one this afternoon in a water tunnel under a field, echoed not only by itself in the reverberating cavern, but by a brood of ducklings trying to keep up in the dark.

Seagulls.
Robins.
Blue things and red things.

Beyond that, these flutes of the air are a mystery to me.

To center myself, I have devised a plan to get to know these birds.

I choose a favorite call, and then look with all my might for the source. My first pick sounded, to me, like the Simpson's portrayal of an Irish leprechaun.

While tying up my peas this week, I finally spotted the culprit - a surprisingly recognizable finch:
The Cardinal.

I sense this longing among my peers to reclaim what's been lost in the last few generations.

A connection to the land.

An understanding of how things work.

A sustenance based on community.

Beauty in imperfection.

Simplicity and the work that comes with it.

An awakening to the voices around us; the birds and frogs and millionfold mysteries that make our world a living and functioning place.

A new amour propre, that values the self in relation to these things in the present. In the process.

Next on my list, a bird that switches from high, punctuated notes, to low fermatas.

I don't care to know it's name, but I hope to awaken to its presence.

It grounds me in my own.