Darkness and Dragonflies

The winter solstice is my birthday, and at some point during this time of year a sense of home comes over me, a settling of muscles and ease of breath. It’s as if I’m hearing my native language being spoken for the first time after a long absence. Some years it takes longer than others, but when I finally recognize it, I feel pure joy. I feel known.

I like the dark. In the dark there are no mirrors or screens on which to project. In the total darkness of the solstice, for just a heartbeat, creation winks out and I can feel the ground, the real and true ground, the tortoise that holds up the world. It is what we come from, and what we return to. Some might find it empty and strange, they might feel stripped of something they think they need; but I am grateful for the emptiness, like a gasping fish returned to the sea. I remember that I am nothing and think, “Oh.” All fires inevitably burn out or are extinguished, but darkness endures and is the source of all light.

The darkness is where we rest, where we let go of what we’ve been clutching and recombine with the “rest” of what we are. This communion with the larger pool creates intelligence in a system that has become closed. Without it, we would go mad, and think that this is all there is.

Last night I dreamed I was in a theater searching for my mother, with whom I had been seated in the front row. But the theater kept changing, and I couldn’t find my original seat. I stepped out into the night and what I was seeking became a lighted dragonfly streaking past me up into the sky. Within seconds it was met by others of its kind, and they lined up and swirled in a spiral. Then the first dragonfly went dark, and the others around it became disorganized and flew away. In the dream I thought, “Oh, I get it. Until it lights up, they can’t tell it’s there.” The dragonfly looked down at me with maternal approval and love, then lit up again, and returned to its dance.

Rest well, and may your solstice be sweet.

A Gorilla in the Midst

I was visited by a beautiful silverback gorilla a few days ago during a meditation that sought to resolve a painful recurring issue in my life. Sometimes animals in visions do talk, but without speaking a word, he modeled a grounded state of being that my body understood and mimicked without hesitation. My muscles spontaneously discharged all the stress they were holding, and I wept with the kind of comprehension that only comes from a complete systemwide shift. I got it. Breathing with him, I felt the resolution of something that had been stealing all the pleasure off my plate for as long as I could remember.

James Hillman says in his book Dream Animals, “A snake is not a symbol.” When we are visited by something alien and wonderful in visions or dreams, there is a terrible inclination to immediately try and make sense of it. The conscious mind is always trying to make itself comfortable, to keep things within the parameters of its own limitations. So instead of allowing ourselves to be moved, affected, by this representative of a more natural state of being, we immediately paste a label on its forehead, in our minds or in our therapy sessions, and overlook the being itself. It’s a terrible elision.

Imagine if you had traveled all the way from wherever dreams come from to visit someone and they completely ignored you and talked only about you -- or worse, altogether forgot you were standing there. You’d probably hang around for a while feeling awkward and disappointed, then amble on to someplace more welcoming; and the person you had visited would be left with only an incomplete contraction of the invitation you were trying to convey.

When I’m frightened, I want answers. But a mystery solved inadequately makes me feel robbed, some part of me knowing that I have missed an important opportunity. It is a terrible loss, as if poachers had come and turned my beautiful dream friend into a pile of souvenirs, forcing me to buy back cheap mementos of an experience I wouldn’t let myself have, a place I never really visited.

So the more moments I can spend not knowing who this creature is, not deciding what he means, not penning him in with interpretations that make me less uncomfortable with the -- well, the 500-pound gorilla in the room, the more I feel the hum of an immense apparatus deep inside me coming to life. The tiny point in space that is what I know of myself connects up with the grid of potential from which we are fashioned and for brief moments I feel what is available to me. This is what it means to ground.

Ironically, this is one of the lessons to be learned from a gorilla, possibly the most grounded being on the planet. But if I had been looking for this lesson, trying to figure it all out, I would not have gotten the message.

Gryphon

My 13-year-old son saw me struggling the other morning, working on my mythical blog. He asked me what I was doing, and when I told him he said, “Oh, blogs are easy. You just have to write a little bit about something that happened that day, or something you saw that was funny.” Like I’d lucked out and been given really simple homework, those great gimme assignments where you don’t have to do any research or show your work on a separate piece of paper.

So maybe a blog can be like Reiki. You don’t need to have it all mapped out perfectly and cleanly, you don’t need to be balanced and aware, you just need to start, to sit with the intention to connect to yourself and share from as deep as you can go. We’re designed for this, for sharing, for the spread of wellness. It’s easy.

Our sweet dog, Gryphon, died last week. Gryphon was – seriously, no hyperbole – the nicest dog on the planet and the kindest being I have ever met. He didn’t have an alpha hair on his body, yet seemed to have a patience, a source of strength and calm, that sat – well, okay, lay – in the middle of our family, a compass that always pointed to the truth. Back when I used to work out of my home, he would greet each client when they arrived, sit at their feet and gaze at them with wonder; they’d pet his head, and he’d gently burp, a little doggie shaman release of whatever they might have been holding.

The smell of a dog: pure devotion mixed with the most revolting thing they could find to roll in that day. Now I miss it, and in a horrifying rush I understand who he was. Why didn’t I hug him more? How could I have let him get sick and die? What is the point of all I know if it didn’t prevent me from waking up one morning and realizing too late who had been sleeping on my floor all these years? I get what those eyes were trying to tell me, that I worry about all the wrong things.

At first I felt only the slightest tug in my chest, like a large fish had taken a small sample of bait before dragging the whole boat under. I sat in that awful pause between a very bad thing and my ability to feel it. I felt as though the world had gotten bigger and scarier, my tools looking silly and childish held up to the immensity of the universe. And the universe was not me; I felt separate and afraid, supported only by the structure of all the work I’d done on myself, phantom scaffolding standing sadly on a beach long after the castle made of sand had been washed away. All the wrong things.

For some reason beautiful things happen to me while I’m riding the bus to the city. Something about dropping the reins of my own personal chariot, I suppose. But a few days after Gryphon died I was watching the rock and dirt and scrubby brush of the Waldo Grade go by, and I felt it, a pulsing web of well-intentioned kindness that is the natural intelligence making up this world. My first response was a terrible shame, an awareness that those hands have been trying to help me all this time, not push me under. And even the shame was a result of misunderstanding the nature of things; this ancient love only wanted me to know myself.

This was the music Gryphon had been listening to. This is the ground from which we spring. This is what we are made of, and it is always trying to communicate with us.

Sometimes faith gets lost so you’ll chase after it, like a dutiful dog who suddenly takes off after something wild. You stumble to follow over rocks and tangled roots and plants that make you itch and swell, only to find yourself in an eerie and beautiful land outside of the ordinary. And however long you linger – an hour, 300 years – your heart will be changed by what it has seen, and everything that happens to you from that moment on will be organized around this awareness, whether you choose to suffer in willful amnesia or surrender to the simple truth.

Good dog.