this is NOT the woman i met, it is a stock Photo by Yulia Rozanova on Pexels.com
It seems I often dream of eastern/Asian symbology when something new is coming to form in my life, yet recently the symbols manifested in my *waking* dream.
An Asian elder came into the apothecary I work in, and we were dialoguing about her symptoms…lo and behold she was dealing with *exactly* the same pain symptoms I have recently been struggling to manage.
She and I recognized the specific nature of the synchronicity and smiled at each other.
She told me about a particular herbal formula that she’d been directed to use by her medicine people, her great trust in that process…and then she left.
Hours later as I was closing up the shoppe, this real/dream elder came back, a bag of strange and mysterious herbs in hand. She told me to decoct the mixture and that we could share about how it was working for both of us.
This is not a totally unusual experience at the apothecary portal, but a beauteous and magickal one nonetheless. I haven’t seen the woman since then. I kind of wonder if I ever will. I kind of wonder if she was real, or if she was a cross-over dream character giving me direction when I most needed it.
Who knows? The line between the waking and sleeping dream has long been hazy for me. All I can say is blessed be to the dream teachers, and to this particular elder that shared so presently with me. I have hopes for how the decoction alchemizes inside
.
Thanks for reading! I am deciding to vary my consistent poetry structure to include some prose, I would love to know if you’d like to have just poetry or if this is a welcome change?
Lately, I’ve been having a lot of dreams of cats. Big black ones, forcefully crawling into my arms and caressing my skin with velvety fur. I’ve also been seeing them in my meditations, as gifts, as guides. This is not new, cats have always been a sort of spirit animal for me, in both their physical and ethereal forms.
Yet this morning, I read a friend’s lament over how it seems there has been some evidence of cats contracting the COVID-19 virus, and the potential for them to spread it to humans. Mind you, I don’t just accept that as fact, firstly doubting “news” until clear evidence and trending is shown. The CDC has not stated that this is a threat as of yet: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/animals.html.
However, I know how we react as a species overall, and it saddens me to think what might happen as people start fearing their own companion animals in light of this news. I hope reason makes this not so.
Whatever the response of the rest of my species, it got me thinking. It got me thinking of what I would do if animals started exhibiting signs of being able to spread viruses to us. Of course I don’t know how I’d ultimately react in the moment of this being reality, but my first response was “Hell yeah. About time. I will die for you. Or at least risk it.” Would I give my cat away, abandon it, avoid its touch in fear of this? Would I stay away from the oceans, the trees, the creepy crawlies that touch me as I wander through them? I don’t think so. I welcome the possibility that if Nature thinks its time for us to go, then maybe its time. And hell NO would I harm or abandon an animal because of this.
It reminds me a bit of my journey with a restrictive eating disorder, actually. I’ve often likened my own experience to “fasting for a vision” in the desert, learning from the animals and plants in the circle around me, making the Sacrifice. I feel that in some sense, I have played this out, eating less, living lightly, humbly, respectfully, in the great shadow of the largeness of nature. Taking up less space so that She may have more. Granted, I am working on this, accepting that maybe both me and Nature are worthy of space on this planet, but boy have I had practice with surrendering my health and happiness so that She may not be decimated.
So this reminds me of that. It reminds me of so many things. One thing I know for sure: I will not turn away from the big black cat in my dreams, nor the one snuggling on the top of the red dryer in my laundry room. I will welcome them, into my arms. Even if it means I may die.
In my memoir, Food Memories*, the Cannery Row area in Monterey, California figures prominently. These scenes involve my first romantic relationship with a boyfriend that for anonymity sake, I call “Eric.” This picture shows the remnants of a once-lively teen hangout behind Cannery’s Edgewater Packing Company. The lighter building on the left once housed an old-time carousel, soda fountain, arcade, magic shop and antique photo booth. Now, it is a recently closed IMAX theater.
The cement sidewalk/bike trail is the same as it always was, providing thoroughfare to countless Aquarium tourists on bike carriages, drunken lovers walking home from bars, gangs looking for fights, metalhead stoners wanting to play boomboxes loud and raucous. The drinking fountain is new.
In May 1991, I had a dream that Eric was killed by a gigantic tsunami here, on the edge of this sidewalk. In the dream the sidewalk was close to the water’s edge, and I watched as the gigantic forces of water nature swallowed him before my eyes. I remember waking up, sweaty and heart-racing, and the relief of realizing it was only a dream.
On June 1, 1991, my first boyfriend was murdered here, on the edge of this sidewalk. As the gun was shot off in the midst of a crowd, there was no clarity about who shot it, nor was the gun ever recovered. This man, whom I loved immensely, died here under the not yet erected drinking fountain, in his best friend’s arms, with no one to blame. I was lucky, and not so lucky, be absent when it happened. I’m not sure how I would have handled him bleeding out in my arms.
The tsunami didn’t literally happen, but his death did. The waves of despair and unconscious devastation were likely the metaphor. And of course, for a brief moment I wondered–should I have stopped it? Could I have? Why was I shown that in the dream? But everything went blank relatively quickly in the aftermath. That questioning stopped. I stopped dreaming, or at least remembering the dreams, for a long time after that.
Just down the road from where he was killed was this place, known to us teens as “The T’s.” These are remnants of the old Steinbeck-era canneries, their skeletons slowly being whittled down by crashing waves and by corporate tourist traps infringing on the area. An early scene in Food Memories describes how me and Eric sat here, on this beach, with his gigantic wolf-dog. Here we basked in the sun, stoned and eating deli sandwiches from a local shop. Eric was fond of putting potato chips on his sandwiches, and he did the same for my sandwiches. I grew to like this combination, however sacrilegious my dieting/Anorexic/culturally/brainwashed mind considered this. Eric controlled all of my food during our relationship, but in a really non-verbal way. I just ate what he ate, when he ate. I knew there would be drama if I didn’t. But I wasn’t complaining, I drank in this structure like a starving child.
In another scene from Food Memories, I attempt to show how this man was helping me find my way back to learning how to enjoy living after descending into the realms of depression, suicidality and Anorexia. His care, concern and (probably slightly co-dependent) caretaking of me was something I had never felt before. This scene recounts the morning after my first big arena metal show with him and his friends, and how we share a moment with pancakes, oozing with syrup, and playing children scurrying by. It shows how much I look to him, and the depth of gratitude I had for his presence in my life.
So you can probably imagine what happened to my burgeoning recovery and enjoyment of food when he died.
This man, the person that was never found that killed him, and the possible larger forces that orchestrated this experience, of his loving and his dying, changed my life forever. Almost 30 years later I still feel those moments so viscerally–that sun on my face, the crunch of the chips, the seagulls shrieking overhead, his face as he looked at me. I took a deep dive into the underworlds, over and over, after he died, and have struggled to understand and thrive despite this occurrence. Part of my struggles with eating stem from that, and to say intimate relationships are difficult is an understatement. Although I have done much work on myself around all of this I will never be able to truly shake what happened.
This is where my first boyfriend died. This is where the dreaming worlds and waking world collided. This is where a shuttered IMAX now stands.
*If you’d like to learn more about Food Memories, you can support a small bookstore by purchasing it here:
Letting Go 