Let's Look to Landscape
Dear dreamer,
Today is Earth Day.
Take a moment right now to notice what dream companions, guides, or ancestors may be present with you.
Notice what landscape or environment they bring you to.
What is the tone of this place?
Can you sense its desire?
Is there any way of being that it may be wanting from you?
How do your companions interact with this place?
This morning I found my trio of dogs were present, and they took me to two landscapes: the Lake of Mystery and my own backyard. In both of these places, there is always the possibility of new life or new adventure emerging. My dogs turned their nose to the earth to sniff out what was shifting in the soil of the garden–what emergent life they could now discover that had been underground before. What bugs were crawling today, what fresh leaves unfurling. At the Lake of Mystery, their tongues in the wind could taste the breeze of the next adventure coming.
My dream last night brought me to a landscape that was a little frightening, both in its wildness and its industrial flavor.
I was swimming in water, not terribly deep, a bit murky.
A creature sleeping on the bottom, maybe a seal of some kind, awoke to swim after me and my dog, who I tried to protect.
In this place, there were large tanks in the water, and maybe a bridge or pier of some sort.
As I began attending to this dream more deeply, I found that the somewhat ugly industrial landscape wanted to be found beautiful–and not through a trick of the imagination, transforming it back into a pristine landscape. Could I find something aesthetically pleasing or interesting about this landscape as it was?
Like when I was a child, able to use a neighborhood garbage area as my theater stage–what curiosities would a child-like imagination find in the nooks and crannies of these tanks and this pier solidly planted in this murky water?
And then a question for the collective comes forward: How can we begin to value the man-made structures we’ve embedded in our ecosystem, so that we can tend to these places with a greater environmental attunement? Rather than letting these places go as rejected landscapes of human garbage, can we begin to see how these places are also Nature? And when we can see them as Nature, will we also be able to feel the pulse of desire running through them?
And then I turned my attention to the wild creature that came swimming after me and my pup. What happens if I turn to meet it rather than swimming away?
How can we befriend the wildness that scares us? The centipedes and bugs in the dirt? The prickliness of the california grass?
From what I have received, it seems that dreams are calling us all to expand our capacities to love the ugly, scary parts of Nature on this Earth Day. It is easy and important to love the beauty. What stretches us further is learning to love what at first feels repulsive.
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