Awake Inside the Dreaming Earth:
Meetings With the Ancestors
I sit at my altar this cold, dark morning illumined by a single candle burning. My heart is overflowing with questions too large for me to hold alone. I place a stick of palo santo (holy wood), over the candle flame and watch as smoke moves like a dragon through the air, forming a bridge between worlds.
With closed eyes, images begin to emerge through my inner world from the dreaming earth.
There is a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the soul door. I hear a knock, and although I am not sleeping, I wake inside a dream. Standing at the edge of a wasteland, my gaze follows the hum of a new, barely visible world emerging inside this moment. I want to act, to move toward it, but my vision is still unclear. As I stand in the discomfort between what I want and what is needed, I remember that such thresholds are crossed through enduring the Great Aloneness of waiting.
Bald eagle emerges so close I can see her eyes. I am alone, yet not alone. Awe and gratitude melts the icy waters of uncertainty, and something begins to flow.
Within this lucid dream, I recognize a reality pulling me toward itself like the answer to a prayer. Not just my prayer, but the Prayer of All Prayers. Something tells me that in my very standing here at the threshold between life and death, my presence is the offering, and that that is enough. As I offer myself to the altar of the full, mad, mess of the human condition, the ancient ones sing to life a wild, holy beauty wrapped in knotted flames so that the heart stays warm and the soul alive.
Although I want to do something, anything, to get out of this discomfort, my bones tell me that if I move too quickly some essential part of me will be left behind. Although this offers little comfort, something true at the center of my wholeness settles into itself and it is clear that no one part of me wants to exist without the rest. And so it is.
And then I hear the future ancestors calling, whispering, singing me forward. They surround me just on the other side of this moment, holding me in ritual space. Immense love and encouragement seeps through the membrane between self and other, filling me with a wild grace and loving me into being just a little more, and a little more. I feel their deep concern but also their enduring wisdom and strength. They help me to stay here in the long dark for as long as it’s necessary until I know just what to do next. Continue reading “Awake Inside the Dreaming Earth: Meetings With the Ancestors” →