Big Dreams Can Carry You a Lifetime
Today I was unpacking and storing groceries in my kitchen when I came across a rubber band, a small one, the size maybe of a communion wafer. I didn’t want to keep it, but lately it seems insane that we just throw things in garbage cans and expect them to go away and cause no harm. Most things we throw away on a daily basis cause the overload of waste we’re seeing around the world and a dire threat to ecological life on the planet.
I’ve also been listening to the spectacularly beautiful audio book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants”. If you’re not mindful of the planet before her book, you can’t help but fall a little bit more in love with nature after reading it.
Now, I’m standing there with this rubber band thinking I can’t toss it, as is, because what if an animal suffers harm from it? I’ll cut it I think. When I cut the rubber band, a powerful image from a Big Dream swims into consciousness. I titled the dream “Howling Mary” ( I’ve written about it many times on this blog; here’s a link to the original.)
The last scene in that amazingly prophetic dream from my Senior year in college is of me having, in desperation at Mary’s distress, snatched the consecrated chalice from a priest who was about to give communion and began to serve each worshiper myself. When I had first snatched the chalice and looked in, I was horrified to see writhing worms, but as I steadfastly began to hand them out to each outstretched hand, they were rubber bands.
In an earlier post I described how poignant the dream still was for me, how I hear Mary howling and understand now, decades later, why she howls. I was writing about what happened to CBS 60 Minutes correspondent, Lara Logan while covering the Arab Spring demonstrations in Egypt, in February of 2011. If you don’t know, here’s the full story, so now you know.
I wrote:
Why is Mary Howling? The huge imbalance, injustice and under- championed status of women in patriarchies all over this current world, the one that is imploding of its own greed and wrong-heartedness, is causing more and more suffering. She's mad as hell and won't take it any more.
Now, looking at this rubber band I cut in two, trying to figure out how best responsibly to dispose of it, the gestalt hits me; yes, Mary is howling about how women are treated AND She is howling about how the Earth, Her Body, is treated under world-wide patriarchal rule. Of course She is!
The Feminine Divine was banished along with a long list of human attributes deemed “feminine”. Inner-knowing or intuition, compassion, forgiveness, sexuality, the spirit in the physical in favor of an other worldly cerebral spiritual and of course, women themselves were banned from full equality in the eyes of religion and the law.
From this first enslavement of half of humanity to the will of the penis gender, it flowed that enslaving whole peoples the ruling male class deemed lesser was also justified by their toxic paradigm.
The first peoples of North America were one group viewed by the uber-patriarchal colonizing settlers as weak and stupid because they respected the earth and saw Spirit in all things. Patriarchies operate under a might makes right paradigm that allows for ever more horrific displays of cruelty and brutality. Patriarchal thinking also places great emphasis on knowledge as power but undervalues wisdom and understanding.
The Feminine Divine Archetype is the repository for banished wisdom, understanding and psychic experience. Direct personal access to an individual’s inner world was dammed and diverted by patriarchal religions which forced us to look at all divinity as Male and in command. The Good News is that you can't stop humanity from dreaming and you can't stop dreams from revealing our personal and collective truths. No wonder we've been taught to ignore rather than how to understand dreams.
Mary is truly pissed and fed up with this needless suffering! All it takes is each one of us to let go. Let go of the tons of bullshit that we’ve been taught. Let go of any idea that undervalues all human beings as one and the same. We’re all eternal beings having a human existence for a purpose known only to each.
Let go of the absurd anthropomorphizing of divinity. Recognize that the grand Mystery behind this amazing existence is much bigger than our puny projections. Recognize also that the prevalent projection of one sex on divinity is a power play that gained purchase in humanity and has lasted some 6 thousand years; a comparatively small fraction of our history on this planet. Unfortunately, the result is a dying planet and endless grief for all beings on it.
Dreams are calling many souls to a new awareness that is desperately needed in order to heal from the psychic trance patriarchy, especially its religions, induce. What is amazing to me once again is the power of a dream that is so very old; for an image in that dream to come alive to me in meaning so many years later is awe inspiring. And for that image to teach me a lesson, for that dream to keep on schooling and sustaining me so many years later is deeply comforting. My dreams are my best teachers.
