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More about singing and a dream

January 21, 2010

Yesterday I wrote about the song singing over the earth, using Rilke’s words. The feeling from that writing stayed with me all day. Today a lovely woman who regularly comes up to the mountain to do one day retreats with me was here for one of our days together. We talked and worked with her dreams through the morning and then during the afternoon, which she spends quietly journaling and reflecting, I took a nap and fell into a dream. A group of “carolers” (not Christmas carolers, just singers) had come to my house and were standing outside of the window to my office. They were singing not a two or three part harmony, but rather it seemed like a 16 part harmony, or many more that they had worked out – the singing so perfectly and intricately toned  that it was beyond anything I can describe. I tried to get up to go tell my guest that they were here and that we should run outside to see them and listen. I couldn’t get back into my body to move. Then she came into my room (still in the dream) to tell me that they were here and I tried hard to get back into my body, and finally made it. They had moved into a place nearby where they had numerous instruments being utilized along with their voices. It was one of the most exciting and intriguing things I had ever seen – and utterly surprising.

After my nap I told my friend of the dream. She sat quietly and then said she wondered if it was the spirits of this mountain singing over our work. I liked that. I am moved by this dream, so responsive to yesterday’s thoughts and feelings, and so affirming.

And just now I read today’s Rilke reading, in a poem called “God Speaks” from his Book of Hours. I’ll excerpt some lines:

I am, you anxious one.

Don’t you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch?
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings.

I am the dream you are dreaming.
When you want to awaken, I am waiting.

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The Song Singing over the Earth

January 19, 2010

…
Above the change and the loss,
father and freer,
your singing continues,
god of the lyre.

How can we embrace our sorrows
or learn how to love,
or see what we lose

when we die? Only your song
over the earth
honors our life and makes it holy.
                          -Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke has long been a favorite poet, and quotes from his writings weave through my conversation regularly. That may happen more often this year as I just found a book I didn’t know existed called A Year with Rilke with readings for every day. When I read today’s piece, quoted above, my mind went to an enormously touching scene in yesterday’s news report from Haiti. A woman had been trapped inside a building for 6 days – her husband apparently just knew she was alive in there without any way to validate that knowing until yesterday.  Finally, miraculously, they dug to a place where there was a hole in the rubble. The man called his wife’s name and she answered. She was right inside that hole. 

When after three hours of careful digging they pulled this woman safely out and put her on a stretcher, after six days in the dark with no food or water or clue whether she would ever be found, she lay on that stretcher and started singing with a full rich voice. Singing! Reporters, on-lookers, people all crowded around and I wished I could have asked everyone to gently back away and let this woman sing until she was finished singing. Sing over this whole tragedy. Please let us  hear the song.

I was privileged to go to Kenya on an intercultural exchange organized by Daniel Martin and Wangaari Matthai in 1997.  One of my most moving and profound memories of the people in the villages is of their constant joyful singing – all of them, all of the time, all day long. In the middle of a conversation a word spoken could trigger a song and they began, with smiles, shoulders and hips involved in the singing. It seemed everyone there had powerful, rich voices. After a few moments, the song would stop and the conversation continued; but soon another one would erupt. This happened during planting, carrying water, cooking, cleaning, you name it. I felt our cultural poverty that in general we don’t do that. Listening to music is very important to most in the world I live in, but actual erupting into song in the middle of a conversation or workplace – not so much.

Right now, reading this poem of Rilke’s about the god of the lyre singing over us, and hearing this woman from Haiti still singing in my brain, and knowing that the Kenyans and so many more are singing today, all day, I feel more at home in the earth. Conceptually I know that the air is not empty and it carries the earth’s song, but these memories help me to feel it in my belly and in my heart. I like that, and I’m grateful.

P.S. That was intended to be an ending for this writing, but as I was looking over it I suddenly remembered my dream of last night. It was of a man who shattered a vase over his wife’s throat and deliberately used a triangular piece of the glass to cut her wind pipe and kill her. Their daughter was looking on and crying.  I seemed to be both the wife and the daughter. I went to the wake and was neither of them, the daughter was with me. I was the only one there who knew what had happened and I felt physically ill.

I didn’t know what I might write about today until I read that poem of Rilke’s and the woman from Haiti came back to mind. But my dream knew! There is personal meaning in it for me, of course, but also collective meaning I believe. In our patriarchal world the throat of the feminine has been sliced, her rich voice silenced. The daughter inside of each of us, male and female, is weeping at this tragedy; and the woman in us is a witness, and is physically ill because of it. God of the lyre, please help us.

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Avatar and Healing the Split

January 18, 2010

Over the weekend I saw Avatar for the second time, accompanying a friend who really wanted to see it. Themes in the movie resonate with much of what I have worked on for the last decade. The book I am writing, as yet untitled, is a re-writing of my doctoral dissertation,  Reawakening Indigenous Sensibilities in the Western Psyche. It is about the split between the indigenous ways of sensing and knowing inside us and the development of the ego and the Western structures of mind; two very different, apparently opposed, operating systems.  The major tool that I use for doing this healing work with myself and others is dream analysis, learning the language of the dreams of the night.

The most fascinating image for me in the movie was the chamber for traveling between the worlds. The protagonists go to sleep in one world and wake up in the other. That is exactly how dreams of the night work, unbeknownst to most scientists who study dreams, much to my serious aggravation. The dream world is just that, a world we enter, an autonomous realm of seeing and experiencing. We go to sleep in this world and wake up to life in that other world. As humans have evolved we have split off remembering or respecting this, to our detriment I believe. Just as in Avatar, we wake up in this world we call “real”  to eat, work, crap, make records and logs, laugh, smoke, do whatever it is that we do, and then return. Indigenous people do not split the realms as we do; they know that both are real and interface each other, and that dreams reveal crucial experience and information. To ignore it is to self-destruct, as we are doing. The beauty of the movie for me is the demonstration of this.

Ever since I was little any time life was hard for me I wished I could be asleep. My mother came in to ask me why I was crying in my crib one day and I responded, despairingly, “I’m awake!” It was so sad I guess. As a 6 or 7 year old, stuck on a horse in a pounding hail storm with miles yet to go before we were home, Mom quotes me as crying and saying, “I wish I were alseep!”  For the last few years I have been struggling with a sleep disorder; it is very difficult to get to sleep and even more difficult to wake up once I am asleep, like I am in a coma. Sleep clinics, medications, serious attention to Jungian analysis, nothing has been working to heal this problem so far. Every day I feel like a lone pioneer trying to resolve it, and am starting to think that this must be part of my calling. Yet it is difficult, and I know that I really must find the way to improve. (The quote for today in my book of daily readings from the poet Rilke says: “The tasks that have been entrusted to us are often difficult. Almost everything that matters is difficult, and everything matters.”)

I feel my particular struggle is emblematic somehow of the split that we collectively suffer between our indigenous and enculturated selves and between our sleeping and waking selves. Maybe without knowing I have put myself into a test tube to work on this; my life and my self have become an experiment to see what might be done.  The only medicine that I haveso far found essential in helping me is the concept of non-violence. I become angry and upset with myself on both ends of the problem – for not being able to do the simple thing of getting to sleep, or the simple thing of waking up. The more judging or impatient I get with myself, the worse the problem gets. The more compassion, curiosity,  tolerance and persistent attention I am able to apply the more I feel I am getting somewhere. It is not an easy tension to hold.

James Cameron has hit a nerve in the collective psyche in both Titanic and Avatar, each immense blockbuster hits. Both demonstrate in their own way the hubris, cluelessness and tragedy of the Western imperialistic standpoint of mind and its catastrophic, heartbreaking consequences. As a student (and doctor) of depth psychology my supposition about why so many millions of people flock to these movies over and over again is because seeing them is like staring into a mirror of our own personal and collective unconscious, and we’re trying hard to see who we really are and how to work out our difficulties. I think Cameron is elucidating and resolving splits in his own psyche brilliantly by telling these stories, and is giving us the opportunity to do the same along with him. Every artist is doing something similar, really. Art, like dreams, help to reveal and heal the split. Art and dreams come from the same or similar realms.

The song lyric “Breaking up is hard to do…  They say that breaking up is hard to do, now I know I know that it’s true.” has always sung itself in my mind as “Waking up is hard to do.” Literally and figuratively, it is hard to do. I’m working on how to make it less difficult. May the gods continue to assist.

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Committment

January 17, 2010

The day that I began this blog, January 15, 2010, I made a committment to myself to write on it for 40 days straight — this to prime the writing pump and to prevent becoming lazy, or shy, or a pefectionist. I also committed to work each of these same 40 days for at least a brief while on my new website, which is as yet unposted, and on my book.

Before I moved to North Carolina in August of 2004, there was no question about what I was committed to. I was a mother of a daughter who lived at home (and of another already living on her own), and I worked as a professor. Those were my primary committments, everything else was just maintenance for the most part. Prior to that I had been a wife, minister and mother, no question what I was committed to. After my move, my daughter no longer needed me on a daily basis, no students needed me, nor did anyone need me for anything in particular. I couldn’t die because that would upset people, but other than that I was utterly free to choose what I wanted to commit to.

Connection to nature and wilderness, a primary reason I moved here – I was committed to that but it was a vague calling  from day to day. Survival financially and personally, those were major committments, but again the pursuit was chaotic and vague. A continued quest for truth, for spiritual and psychological development, and the desire to be of assistance to others — these have always been foundational committments, but I no longer had ready-made structures for these. My book, recovery from a grieving process, I have been committed to these but floundering.  There are enormous physical demands in living where I live – keeping acres of grass mowed, fire wood gathered, snow shoveled; but in general I have had the burden of too much freedom with no pressing pre-prioritized committments to create a structure for my life.

So now, to have made this promise  to write for 40 days, this day being the third – I can’t say what kind of stability it has already added to my sense of things. I have tried for more than 5 years of living here to create a writing schedule to absolutely no avail. I have been an utter failure every time, with excuses every single day for why I really must take care of  this other thing instead – it will bring work, it creates a network, I need the social life, rain is coming so the grass has to be mowed today. It never seems to end.

What has happened that I’m now committed to writing each day? The promise of this New Moon/Eclipse has felt big, the 40 day idea seems manageable. But I am hopeful, very hopeful, that this will create a momentum that will continue and build. To paraphrase John Lennon, life is what just kept happening while I was making these other plans, but somehow now I’ve moved the puzzling pieces of life around to make the writing piece fit.  What will it take to commit after these 40 days are over? Why has this committment been so hard to find all along? These are the questions I will live, as the poet Rilke advises,  until I stumble upon an answer.

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Redemption

January 16, 2010

In the weeks before this past Christmas 2009 I seemed to be in a life review internally, seeing from the perspective of my current age and experience things I could only wish to somehow be able to do over. For example my youngest daughter went through her adolescent years with me utterly wrecked by the heartbreak of the ending of my marriage. I developed PTSD and was having anxiety attacks after some shocks that were devastating psychological blows. No child deserves to have to live with a mother who is in this condition, and especially not this child. I can’t get those years back with her to enjoy them differently, and I grieve that.

Stages of life are fleeting and we are often so ill-prepared to appreciate and fulfill the potentials of them. During these weeks of thinking things through a question kept occurring to me: is redemption possible? Can what seems to have been irrevocably lost like that be redeemed? The things we didn’t do well, lost opportunities, situations we screwed up by handling them badly, the could-have, would-have, should-haves… can somehow the lost energy, grace and wisdom of those times return to us? Or is it all lost forever, and an attitude of serene acceptance with determination to move on is the best way to handle the realizations. Or, is redemption possible?

These were my musings. Organically my thoughts kept wandering through the reviews, and then bringing me back to the same question. Occasionally a little tickle of energy in my belly seemed to say “yes!” I would made note of it. Thoughts would circle around, and now and then I felt a little tickle of “yes”. A still, small voice, as they say, was speaking.

But last night as I was just walking through my house, seemingly out of nowhere a huge “YES!!!” filled my head, arriving with so much energy. A vision occurred of a big brass bowl of oil which suddenly ignited on fire. The vision seemed to say that in one single moment, everything can be turned to gold. The scene was of pure golden light and fire. All of our mistakes and failures and seemingly lost moments are not lost, but are like drops of oil in a bowl. At some unexpected moment, not because of anything in particular that we do or deserve, only because of continued living and trying, and because of the elegance of the universe itself, all of that energy ignites and everything is redeemed. It IS possible.

I accept this answer to my question. I will keep musing, but I am grateful for this vision.

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Dreams and Shadow

January 16, 2010

Today, January 15, 2010, I write my first blog post ever. First New Moon of the year and the decade, a new beginning. I am a doctor of depth psychology and have a retreat center, Bridging Worlds, in the remote, gorgeous, ancient mountains of Western North Carolina outside of Asheville. My work and passion is to create an environment where people can feel safe to explore their own psychological and spiritual life, either privately or in groups. Reconnection to the natural world and to the indigenous person, with indigenous ways of sensing and knowing, that lives inside of each human is one of my major concerns. Working with dreams of the night is a favorite, and most valuable method. I am close to completing work on my new website, http://www.tayriaward.com which explains a lot more. I am thinking a first blog should say who I am, thus this explanation. I’m a woman, age 58, who lives alone in the wilderness with my dog. I have two daughters, Josi and Arlene, who are powerful and awesome women. Enough information for now. See website for more. This is a place to share thoughts, concerns and ideas.

So I start with a concern that I have felt slammed with during the first part of this new year. There is so little understanding in general awareness of how to deal with and think about what Carl Jung and Jungians call the personal shadow — the parts of ourselves which are alive and active in our personality structure but of which we are unaware. Generally this refers to the “dark” side of the personality, but shadow includes all parts — strengths, weaknesses, everything of which we are not conscious. In this writing I refer to the dark side.

We all have this side, and generally, in my belief, it is only because we are unaware. Generally it isn’t intentional evil or hurt that we commit. The heart is in the right place but words or actions reveal other systems of operation going on, or are misunderstood and trigger those other systems going on in others. And people for the most do not know how to deal with it. They bounce off of each other, hurting each other without meaning or wanting to, and don’t know how to deal with that.

Christmas is often an intense time in crowded environments where a lot of this is going on and not being dealt with. I had experiences myself and keep hearing those of others so that this is becoming a fascination of mine at this moment. I don’t know the cure, of course, but if I could write a prescription it would be trust. Trust in ourselves, trust in each other, trust. There’s a subtle panic that seems to go off when shadow material arrives, and I am thinking the medicine for that is trust. It sounds simple, but it is actually a tall order.

And then listen to dreams that come in the wake of the experience because they rarely fail to comment with some of the only intelligence and astuteness that will be found. Learning the dream language takes attention and an open mind, but is very worth the trouble.

I think there is an urgency in the world right now that we become a lot smarter a lot faster about this problem. So I’m committing myself in this new year and decade to work to figure this out in whatever way that I can. To own it and work on it in myself, have trust and compassion for it in others, and do what I can for anyone who wants to work on it as a dreamworker, assistant and guide for people in their psychological and spiritual quests.

Ok, I just wrote my first blog. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and now it is begun. Happy new year.

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