Sometimes before I go to bed I ask for dreams that will help me understand how to go forward.
In the dream I had last night, I was in my childhood home with my deceased grandmother who I loved best of all in the world, my adolescent girlfriend who died when we were young moms, my favorite cousin and playmate who was found cold in her bed after winning her life goals, and some of the pedos who were part of my childhood. I had come a long, long way to get home again, and I was nine years old once more, too.
We'd lost a snake, a new pet corn snake who was pink and orange and friendly, somewhere in the house. Then it became apparent that there was a Burmese python, someone else's lost pet, running around the house too, along with a king snake that was almost as big as the python and had slithered in from the backyard's wilderness.
We were all hiding from the snakes and searching for them, too, separated from each other by our hiding, yelling messages to help each other locate the correct two snakes to kill.
I found the python when I dared to climb up into my dad's bed, and seeing that dad was protecting it, I stabbed him and then put the same shovel through the neck of the snake. (In the waking world, Burmese pythons are the only pet snake that usually ever kill anyone.)
Grandma recognized the beautiful pet corn snake and I sat at the table with her, the snake, Jenn and Sue, eating a lovely dinner of pinks and laughing about how this was the home for us and we'd live here til the end of time.
We had to accept, though, that the probably harmless king snake was going to be either lost in the house forever, or found and dealt with at a later date.
Ten years ago, I had an almost-four-year-old and a baby and was just sorting through the major questions of politics, religion, what it means to be female in this world, and how I would live my life as a mom and a person with respect for me and my children. I worked hard for answers, leaving few stones unturned, and I settled into a place that continues to make me very happy because it feels like doing rightness.
Five years ago, my lack of health and stance on voluntary simplicity nearly killed me and I had to fight my way to a place of purely physical stability. I used all my powers to figure out how to get there and what it should look like, to learn to navigate independently and holistically at once through the world of work and health. These days I am not so far from those days that I yet take any of my hard-won stability for granted, but I feel the ground beneath my feet quite consciously and that makes me so happy.
I feel myself growing into another set of major how-to-live questions about marriage and friendship and family, how to relate to people holistically and individualistically, how to have relationships that are a model of doing rightness. And somehow the question of death is relevant, the oddness and impossibility of ever saying a true goodbye. So too seems the question of navigating through a family whose pockets are crammed with the dust and crumbs of incestuous pedophilia we've had to eat up.
I am feeling my way blindly and with eyes wide open towards at least a question, or, if not exactly a question, a sense of what the lesson might be about. As my teenager challenges me, I keep remembering my old lover, and wishing her back from death; she was so good with teens, and I can't remember what she'd say about my confounding boy, except that it'd be wise. As my sister comes into speaking terms with old traumas and I balance what I tell her and what I let her tell me, I remember how having a sibling is such an intense lesson in seeing someone right as they actually are. And when I think about staying with Robin til we are old, I think how good I will be at loving if I manage to be good to him for forty years, how learning to be good to him is the master art of applied religion.
I think the three snakes are a foreshadowing of possible answers for me. One answer I will treasure, eating forever at the table with those who taught it to me. One answer is deadly and I must destroy it, and mourn the loss of those who whisper it. One I must sit with unanswered, trusting that I will be okay whether it ever shows up or never does.
Or, maybe I just spent the whole weekend deciding which snake would make a good pet for the newly-turned-eight-year-old. (The kids are each allowed one pet of their own after they turn eight.) Fortunately, it doesn't matter if I made the meaning or the meaning made its way to me.
In the dream I had last night, I was in my childhood home with my deceased grandmother who I loved best of all in the world, my adolescent girlfriend who died when we were young moms, my favorite cousin and playmate who was found cold in her bed after winning her life goals, and some of the pedos who were part of my childhood. I had come a long, long way to get home again, and I was nine years old once more, too.
We'd lost a snake, a new pet corn snake who was pink and orange and friendly, somewhere in the house. Then it became apparent that there was a Burmese python, someone else's lost pet, running around the house too, along with a king snake that was almost as big as the python and had slithered in from the backyard's wilderness.
We were all hiding from the snakes and searching for them, too, separated from each other by our hiding, yelling messages to help each other locate the correct two snakes to kill.
I found the python when I dared to climb up into my dad's bed, and seeing that dad was protecting it, I stabbed him and then put the same shovel through the neck of the snake. (In the waking world, Burmese pythons are the only pet snake that usually ever kill anyone.)
Grandma recognized the beautiful pet corn snake and I sat at the table with her, the snake, Jenn and Sue, eating a lovely dinner of pinks and laughing about how this was the home for us and we'd live here til the end of time.
We had to accept, though, that the probably harmless king snake was going to be either lost in the house forever, or found and dealt with at a later date.
Ten years ago, I had an almost-four-year-old and a baby and was just sorting through the major questions of politics, religion, what it means to be female in this world, and how I would live my life as a mom and a person with respect for me and my children. I worked hard for answers, leaving few stones unturned, and I settled into a place that continues to make me very happy because it feels like doing rightness.
Five years ago, my lack of health and stance on voluntary simplicity nearly killed me and I had to fight my way to a place of purely physical stability. I used all my powers to figure out how to get there and what it should look like, to learn to navigate independently and holistically at once through the world of work and health. These days I am not so far from those days that I yet take any of my hard-won stability for granted, but I feel the ground beneath my feet quite consciously and that makes me so happy.
I feel myself growing into another set of major how-to-live questions about marriage and friendship and family, how to relate to people holistically and individualistically, how to have relationships that are a model of doing rightness. And somehow the question of death is relevant, the oddness and impossibility of ever saying a true goodbye. So too seems the question of navigating through a family whose pockets are crammed with the dust and crumbs of incestuous pedophilia we've had to eat up.
I am feeling my way blindly and with eyes wide open towards at least a question, or, if not exactly a question, a sense of what the lesson might be about. As my teenager challenges me, I keep remembering my old lover, and wishing her back from death; she was so good with teens, and I can't remember what she'd say about my confounding boy, except that it'd be wise. As my sister comes into speaking terms with old traumas and I balance what I tell her and what I let her tell me, I remember how having a sibling is such an intense lesson in seeing someone right as they actually are. And when I think about staying with Robin til we are old, I think how good I will be at loving if I manage to be good to him for forty years, how learning to be good to him is the master art of applied religion.
I think the three snakes are a foreshadowing of possible answers for me. One answer I will treasure, eating forever at the table with those who taught it to me. One answer is deadly and I must destroy it, and mourn the loss of those who whisper it. One I must sit with unanswered, trusting that I will be okay whether it ever shows up or never does.
Or, maybe I just spent the whole weekend deciding which snake would make a good pet for the newly-turned-eight-year-old. (The kids are each allowed one pet of their own after they turn eight.) Fortunately, it doesn't matter if I made the meaning or the meaning made its way to me.