Dream
By Jacob/Owl
I was in a dream last week. I am at a house in the desert with some friends and we are getting ready to go on an evening bicycle ride. In preparation for the bike ride my friends decide to not go, so I go for a sunset walk. On my walk I pass saguaro cactus, palo verde trees, creosote, and other desert plants. I hear a sound behind me and see a trailer bumping down the road. Nothing was pulling the trailer yet it was moving along as if it was being pulled by some invisible force. In the back of the trailer are 3 dead buck deer with their antlers broken, mangled, and smashed, hanging on just by the tips. I am struck by the horror that someone would destroy and damage someone so beautiful. I reach into the trailer and hoist out the first buck I touch. I say to the buck “I will fix you. I will repair you.” I will worship you and bring you back to your glory. I then awake out of the dream.
A week later, I meet with my mentor and reenter the dream, paying attention to each part and retelling the details. The trailer of dead bucks pass and I am grief stricken by the mangled deer. I begin to feel the swell of sorrow, pain, and hurt that I feel about the world. I feel the dying oceans, the dwindling birds and insects, the cut down forests, the suffocated, trampled upon, and discarded. The grief that someone would destroy a world so beautiful infuriates me and touches a part of myself that knows that I must be a part of repairing the broken world and remembering a future that is possible, a future that I will never see.
It is through our dreams that the world enters our psyches. Dreams can be a way for the world to dream into us, leaving us with hidden gems that we must uncover. In these hidden and shrouded places, in the mystery of our dreams, the earth weaves together her feelings, insights, and direction. In this dream, the world weeps and shows her grieving self to me. We know this pain, we all in our own unique way feel this pain, maybe through our dreams or our depression or through our own mania that we, creatures of Earth, feel and know this pain.
In the past, my dreams would torment me and I would turn away from the dark world of dreams choosing to indulge in a green goddess that would help me fade from one middle world day to the next. Absent and avoiding what the world wanted to dream into me. I remember everyday that grief is never easy but without grief we would not know the beauty or love that is possible right outside our doorstep.
Remembering Earth is a process of getting back into the thick of what is happening all around us everyday and becoming more alive in the world that is. Become more alive to our dreams, to our goals, and to some direction in our life. This remembrance begins with advocating for our selves to turn towards what we need and what our souls want us to do with our time here.
Remember this world and this life that we share with us. Seek the mystery in between this world and the next, the world we enter every night when we sleep.