As I come out of the enfolding sleep, a hear a phrase in my mind. My eyes slide along the crack between the blinds and the windowsill. The sky is obliterated again. There is just the thick sickly blended muddy color that the burning world has filled in where the sky once was. My nostrils feel swollen, assaulted by smoke. The fires are everywhere, persistent, threatening.

 

But the word stays clutched in my thoughts. “Substance”. That is the primary idea I cling too. And as I slowly awaken more of the words tied to the first become clear. “Substance and strength”, I hold onto that.

I focus on the entire narrative that wants to disappear into the unremembered dreamfield and pull tightly on the connecting thread. I follow it. There is something there, I realize.

 

When I was 27 and 29 I gave birth so I remember when I lived in Vernon, B.C. Two women befriended me. Maureen was a fighter, a person who was deeply connected to the power of women, to what liberation should look like. Kathy on the other hand had a stone like strength. She showed me that setting your jaw and trusting your own power could be quiet, persistent, effective. What both of these women demonstrated for me was a deep substance in the way they chose to live. They were wives and mothers, yes. But they read, they had a life of the mind which meant they were always adding to their store of knowlege

 

Now the connections were showing up for me. I was seeing the lesson in my dream state. I lay still so as not to lose the wisdom delivered as I slept.

 

My eyes begin to itch with irritation. The body knows when it is being poisoned.

 

Usually, when I first awaken, I orient myself. I check my body. I feel into space between sleep and waking. I see if the pain is with me today from disintegrating vertebrate or if I have emerged whole and free.

 

But today the words stay in my mind. I realize I have taught myself something about my very nature this night after an entire day of being lost.

 

My north star, my purpose, my yearnings have always been for my life to mean something.  The days are heavy at times and yesterday I didn’t want the spreading map of the hours to unfold before me in the morning. I didn’t want the vast expanse of the morning until night because I could see nothing on the surface of the day that engaged my interest.

 

“Everything is falling in on itself,” I thought.

 

The dream reminded me of the moments in which I felt most engaged in my own journey.

 

The trivial repetitive actions that support my continuing to exist, the eating, the preparing of food to eat, the planning of the preparation, the procuring groceries, the maintenance of the car in order to purchase and store the packages and plants, the earning of money to exchange for a method of keeping the body alive. All those hours and habits and actions have used up much of my 76 years.

 

The moments that have a shining intensity as I look out over the map of my life, are the moments in which I was a seeker.

 

Questions are answered by quests.

 
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Lately I have been revisiting C.G. Jung. As the pandemic is enclosing the world into a second state of paralysis, the deepening consequences of mankind’s accumulation of thoughtless repetitions of destructive actions are encircling us. We can no longer escape the pay off.

 

The fires burn and fill the air with tarlike flakes of the destroyed forests. The failure to understand COVID is resulting in more and more individuals falling ill. Winter is moving toward us and the sun will be a mere memory soon.

 

Without the hypnotic trance of the trivial, what will we become? Who will we become?

 

I realize I have used up my life in what I was used to.

 

My north star, my way out of the dark night of my childhood that more closely fit a narrative of a hostage taking than a time of nurturance has always been to find examples of people who were seekers.

 

The books I curled around in my bed were stories of heroes. Madame Curie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Golda Meir, Isadora Duncan informed me. No matter what the current culture’s formulation of restrictions and limitations on the efficacy of a single individual, these individuals did not refuse to step into power.

 

I needed to know that there was more. I needed to see that the scope of human curiosity and attention was magnificent.

 

My eyes opened and the swollen eye lids told me immediately that it would be another day of thick obstructed skies. It would be another day of each breath being ladened and laboured.

 

But Jung had reminded me that we create our own mythology. We look into our own dark well of the subconscious mind to see our creation story.

 

We can choose to feel abandoned, bruised, invisible. It is a childlike narrative that begins to be whispered in our ear when the outside world refuses to give us a map to follow.

 

I have hundreds of hours of storing biographies and autobiographies of people who faced crises and like early explorers simply geared up and went into the wilderness. What kept them whole, what kept them strong was a clear sense of their own purpose. They found out who they were as a result of knowing why they were on the journey.

 

My dreams were talking to me. My dreams showed me two women I once knew who were strong in their own specific and opposite ways. My dreams reminded me that I need to get back to my own myths, my own symbols of power and push into my own wilderness.

 

It has always been thus, Jung reminds us. We are each essentially alone and responsible alone for our manner of being. As I move through the world, I become more and more who I am. I can see that as I lay still in bed waiting to start again.

 

I cannot depend on the exterior existence of  others to protect me from the task of defining and birthing myself, That is and always has been up to the individual. The second next worth is self, I realize. Substance, Power, Self.