Medicine Dream

River-Rebirth by Sandra Mikus

I went to bed last night with the makings of a cold – a sore throat and a defeated achiness that made everything seem heavy and hard.  It felt like the perfect expression of where my grief has led me of late, moist and acidic, and not a place to linger.  As I dropped into sleep, I asked my dreams for help.

I dreamt I was in a dry South Asian country, and that an unwanted authority had taken over.  Suddenly we had no autonomy, and had to follow senseless rules.  Our lives were not our own.  I was walking someplace I was not permitted to be, and I saw a plant that was dying.  I knew the laws dictated I must leave it alone to rot, but I couldn’t.  I didn’t feel courage or fear; it was just not in my nature to let it die. 

The plant was a potted palm, and there was decay in one of the stems.  I took hold of it, and the top separated from the stem, leaving behind a glistening, bright green stump. The part I had in my hand separated again into the leafy top and a connecting piece, both dripping the same verdant juice.   I was immediately aware that all three pieces were viable new growth.  The stump in the soil would sprout new stems, and the leafy top would easily root.  The connecting piece was interesting: androgynous, undefined, and full of potential; you could plant it up or down and it would root or leaf depending on what orientation you chose. 

Frightened and controlling parts of self may want us to walk past our grieving, leaving it to rot in septic puddles of neglect.  But grief properly tended yields abundance and renewal.  We become more than what we were.  Today my body feels raw, like the glistening vulnerability of the place on the stem that let go, but I no longer feel like a conquered nation, powerless in my own land.  I have reclaimed my state, and possibilities abound.

My mother taught me how to listen to my dreams.  We would sit at the kitchen table and she would tell me where she’d been at night, and because I was a child, all I had to do was listen.  She wasn’t asking me to interpret them for her, just be a witness, an anchor in the waking world. 

Dreams, like grief, are meant to be shared. It is the means by which we irrigate our lives from the infinite pool we find when we follow the river in the marrow of our bones.  It is not enough to incubate and cradle our own dreams.  If they are to learn to walk in this world, they must be heard by another. 

Thank you, always, for listening.