Shark vs Dolphin and The Great Sea

 

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Dream: I was with my brother John and we were out on a boat. We went in the water and were swimming around under the water. It was a bright sunny day and a calm sea. I could see under the water and we went quite deep. I had a moment of fear about sharks when I saw a large fish down in the distance. It was deep so it was only a shadowy figure. We couldn’t tell if it was a shark or a dolphin. Then as we were swimming back to the boat I saw a bunch of them below me and they were dolphins. One was leading the way coming up towards me. I reached out my hand to touch her but they were still too far away. I continued to reach down towards them anticipating touching their soft smooth skin.

This dream for me is a very affirming dream. It reflects how supported I often feel in my life to enter into deeper feeling, exploring the depths. It also reflects my knee-jerk, trauma induced tendency towards distrust…perhaps how I project fear and danger onto what actually might be a place of deep desire and longing. The mind says SHARK!, but what really arises is the dolphin. It is a wonderful moment in dreams where we feel our fear and stay long enough within the space to move through it and find that there is actually something quite wonderful. So, shark vs dolphin and the great sea.

Being in the water in a dream is often a profound experience for me. A moment of feeling the great unconscious, the depths, feelings/emotions, fluidity/movement, held in the vast salty womb of the great mother. In this dream, I feel the sensuality of the water on my skin, the presence of my brother and the boat as support/safety and I feel my curiosity as we dive down. As we go deeper, the water becomes a bit darker, less clear. When the shadowing figure of a larger fish comes into focus deep down, I feel fear.

Natural Dreamwork and Working with Conditioning, Habitual Patterns, Shadow

The term “conditioning” in Natural Dreamwork refers to all of the habitual patterns, behaviors, reactions and ways of being, conscious and unconscious, that we have developed to cope, survive, and protect in a world where trauma, sacrifice of self, and lack of support prevents us from opening to deeper, more vulnerable feelings and soulfulness.

Often, we may feel we “know” what our issues are, we may know our history of trauma to which we continually react, or we always feel something just doesn’t seem to work out for us and we are not sure why. We feel we can’t get to our deepest desires, or maybe we don’t even know what those desires are.

Dreams want to help us get to our soulful nature, the part of us that can feel deeply and know our own intuition by virtue of a strong connection to our felt experience and an openness to our vulnerability through those feelings. They do this using some essential functions such as revealing and invoking. A stripping away, like an onion to reveal deeper and deeper layers, and the invocation of feeling in our dream bodies so that we may “know” on a deeper intuitive level our own inner truths. I think of this as the promise of the dream.

Druidry - The Hunter Ally

Guardian of the Seven Sisters
by Laura Smith-Riva

Owl is a most beneficent hunter ally. She watches, her eyes receiving even the faintest of light. She listens, her tufted ears cock towards the faintest of sound. She sits calmly and waits, her head swiveling silently. And then with all the precision of a ruthless hunter, she glides on silent wings and pierces her prey with powerful talons. She consumes the smallest prey whole. Large prey is torn to pieces and consumed in smaller chunks.

And so it is with the work of hunting down all that blocks me or is no longer useful or needed on my spiritual journey. Small changes are integrated more easily. Larger shifts require smaller bites, time to process. Perhaps a bit of the prey is stashed in a tree hollow or some marsh grass to be returned to later.

In Druidry, the hunter ally is first invited in during the Ovate grade - a time of deep reflection in which the student begins to see and acknowledge those parts which are out of balance, bloated or diminished. We hunt for the energies which feed off our fears and siphon our magic, our possibility, our power - all that impedes us on our journey.

My hunter ally came as Owl. She is the perfect response to my sun sign leonine qualities. She teaches me to become a warrior, but not the warrior that is familiar to me who lives within the more yang qualities of reason and logic, the extroverted problem solver, an action oriented doer in all forms. Owl, as a supplicant to the darkness, thrives on the stillness, the silence, contemplation. The moon is her companion and as such the yin qualities of receptivity, deep intuition, and the watery depths of feeling and emotion are her offerings. And yet, she is a fierce hunter, moving through the nocturnal landscape with stealth and surety.

 

The Ancient

"Calm" by Niki Katiki (nikifineart.com)

The dream:

I am a youth with B (a man in my life who is a trusted father figure, mentor). He is on his boat and I am on my own, a small little disc shaped boat which is tethered to his. We are exploring out on the ocean and he is navigating us through the water. My small craft is so low on the water that my little body is floating in the water but yet I still feel safe, connected. I look up and he is at the helm of his boat  which from this angle looks a bit unstable like mine. He is looking back at me and tells me to stay close to him. We pass over some ledge just below the surface and I ask him about it. He tells me it’s call The Ancient and I run my hand over its smooth dark surface. 

This dream for me holds a moment of presence. There is no particular destination that I am aware of, though perhaps the dream imago of the guiding father knows where we are to go. He tells me to be attentive to him, to stay in connection. I am the child, curious, connected to my father, in his care and protection, present to a moment. The dream offers the gesture of stroking my hand across the smooth black stone, The Ancient, to remind me of this presence. Slowing down, sensual touch, innocence. 

The stone is a threshold between the above and below, reminding me of the depths and what lies below the surface and also what arises from the depths with the waxing and waning of the tides of life. Ancient and deeply rooted. Terra Firma at one with the waves.  Mariners, from all times, have navigated the shoals of life just as my navigator guides me. He guides me close enough to touch the smooth surface of The Ancient, perhaps a mountain top at the threshold, as am I.

The Green, Dreaming of Me

 

❂  The Green, Dreaming of Me  ❂

I was not drawn so much to the darkness as to the crucible,

To wrap myself in crisp white muslin, to enter the desert, the burning sun, 

To walk the serpent’s path to the beating heart at the center of it all. 

Blue eyes fading into red corporeal dusk,

Pain kidnaps blackened feet,

One in front of the other, a trod well worn, both flower and thorn. 

Each cairn a hope, a wish, a prayer, a promise. 

Where is my oasis? 

Thirst licks tear, dust meets knee,

A cry to heaven…

A holy vision - the green, dreaming of me. 

Death Valley, 2018 Earth Wander