The last few years have damaged me but as of today I am entering into at least a few weeks of, what I hope to be, recuperation. To be more precise, I don’t have to go to work for at least a month and I can still afford to pay rent and eat as well. This halcyon combination may not last but if forced to choose I will buy food and re-enter the homeless state rather than return to the conditions under which the damage occurred.

This choice may not be necessary but it has become clear to me what I simply cannot tolerate and remain something I recognize as myself.

This is good to know.

via Wimp

A couple of nights ago I had a dream.  I have escaped from a prison along with a young man.  We are flying over the country side, no control, having been shot out of some sort of weapon. I can see the land streaming under me. We cross the coastal lands and I realize that the arc of our flight is going to dump us in the ocean. As the dream opens I see below me small farms and acreages with rusted-out cars, deep pockets of weeds next to broken wood sheds and other signs of poverty and I feel a sense of comfort from the place. I don’t know this land but I feel comfortable with its apparent freedoms, space and its silence.

As I fly past these coastal lands I see the ocean and below the surface a great many ovoid shapes that I know to be creatures. Whales probably. I get no sense in the dream that these are sharks or other killers but that they are dangerous simply because of our relative size. The fact that they may kill me after I drop amid them would be a matter of impersonal circumstance. I am stoic about this possible fate. This is not something I want but at least falling into the water is not necessarily fatal as falling to the earth would have been.

And then the young man and I are in the water and the point of view changes. I can no longer see the beings below, the water is dark, the grey-brown-green of the sea. I also cannot see the land. I cannot control what may happen in the sea. All I can do is swim. So I turn back toward the way I have just come and begin.

I have worked with dreams since I was a young girl and because it is such a long time, my working with them goes in great arcs.  At the nadir I obsess, write down every image, sensation, colour flare in my sleeping. I list all the elements, translate them into narrative. I compare the symbols to past dreams. Turn them into poems, drawings, song, movement. Interpret.

At the zenith of my psychological bow, I surface inside the dream and it stays with me, gently.  Like balm on sore hands the images remain mostly invisible but work nonetheless. Often – acknowledged but left alone – a friend that needs a period of respectful silence before speaking – the dream will resolve into meaning and present itself as something so obvious, so crystalline and ordered, that one wonders how something so obvious was necessary to be spoken.

But it is necessary and, from experience, there is another, and another, layer of insight that will present itself when the initial action of the dream has been played out in waking life. So for this one, the swim is what I am being called upon to do and once I reach sight of land, or landfall itself, the dream will reappear and I will understand more.

Welding dreams to waking life is an act of art. Interpretation always is. The world has no meaning intrinsic to it, at least not any meaning in the human sense of the word. Meaning as we know it is our creation. Yet despite this, a good meaning, one that works for us in our lives must be linked to the actual world. Meaninglessness has at least two components. One is the obvious fact that humans are the source of human meaning and so there is no outside resource by which we can ascertain the Truth. Humans are not interlocutors between heaven and earth. We are in a dyadic relationship with that which is our source. The earth and its patterns are sometimes the nadir and we the zenith and other times we are beneath our own feet.

The dream I had told me a few things. I am finally out of prison, but I am still not in control. I have been shot out of that terrible place and I am passing over that which was for me. In other words, my job is over and I am temporarily immersed in Rez war and politics. And this has dumped me back into the sea of feeling.

I am not an emotional person and there are whale-sized unresolved issues that swim in my unconscious. I am in pain a good deal and of late I have felt despair, and an understanding of how people wear out, how pain can cause even a strong woman to lie down to die. But here in the dream, despite my lack of personal control – my life’s lack of a apparent navigation device – my natural stubbornness has been restored. Often in my past, in a dangerous situation, my mind narrows, and my focus remains locked on getting to safety. This is the feeling I am left with in the dream. All those dangerous huge creatures below me – there is nothing I can do about that. I may be killed by the vasty size of that which I cannot control. This is true – but meaningless since it is not mine to write. All I can do is swim.

This is key in the dream but so too is direction. At the very end of the dream I am in the water beginning the swim to shore, resolute, fear harnessed to forward motion, but where exactly is shore? And what does it represent in waking life?

The question to be answered by subsequent acts of interpretation: Where in waking life does safety lay?

And what I would really like to know – can I stop being shot out of other people’s guns?

I have had a couple of lovely quiet days at a friend’s house. She and her husband have a wonderful home and a large, quiet garden. I have been beading and reading. Regenerative stories, meditative needles and silence.

I leave this morning for Spokane. Court on Tuesday and in preparation I have been reading some material from the Washington State Institute for Public Policy of problems inherent in providing educational services for the deaf and hard of hearing in the state.

I’m looking forward to the drive. I like the basin terrain, seeing the plants as they respond to sun and rain and warm weather. I suspect it won’t be as warm as it was a couple of weeks ago when I was here last since it has been raining, which I view as a good thing since I don’t much enjoy heat.

I have a room booked at my favourite motel in Spokane, but apart from the necessary conversation to pay for the room, this will be a day spent in silence. Bliss.

I think I should have been an anchorite – well except for the necessary religiosity, of course. I wonder if there is a way to make this propensity of mine pay?

I saw this film yesterday. Oh my. It was so glorious, so deeply moving, that I am still in the stage where I am checking to see if I can get tickets to McMurdo Station. Not that I would actually want to live there, but 6 months or so, yes I would want to do that. I can count penguins.

It’s the same thing as the cicada video I just posted. It’s so non-human that I feel as if I am just a part of things – a small, non-important part – and not the center of the universe. I find the switch from center to periphery deeply reassuring, a stunning pleasure.

This center of the universe thing: that’s the problem with cities, they lead you more deeply into the delusion that the universe is about being human, that our measure is also the measure of the rest of eternity, and of course it isn’t. The most horrible thing is that while the feeling of centrality persists, not only is it simply wrong, it is also deeply disruptive. I mean how can one actually attend to what is in fact the case when blinded by one’s own reflection? I mean it would be like assessing the possibilities of the world outside the home if all one’s widows were mirrors.

This film is a visual reminder of both our belonging and of the non-human nature of reality. I am deeply glad that Herzog was granted a pass to the base because, I suspect, this film is the closest that I will ever get to that booming silence.

photographer, peardg

Woke up at 3AM again. Being an efficient woman, I decided to do some chores and so went out to retrieve my laundry. And came face to face with a skunk. Luckily for me the skunk decided to play nice and gave me safe passage. So I was able to deal with my clothes and come back into the house with just the normal human stink.

My heart rate is more-or-less back to normal but I am oh-so wide awake now, hence the computer browsing and blog posting. In the process of having a look-see I found this new photo posted on peardg’s flickr page. The first thing I thought was “oh cool that’s the turn to home.” Bleh.

The photo represents one of the turns close to the edge of the reservation where I have recently been for Thyra’s funeral services and where she is now buried.  Work has been terribly busy of late, and as of yesterday, got even busier. I actually had my head in my hands at the end of the day feeling as I did the long long hours to come if I’m to keep up with the pile. I haven’t really thought about Rez and family things much and I’ve been doing pretty well I thought.

The weather in Vancouver has been absolutely gorgeous. Yesterday peardg and I (she works in the same office as I do, at least for the next couple of weeks) walked over to the art museum and had hot chocolate and tabouli (odd combo huh) sitting outside in the sun. We had a really great waitress which made things even nicer. It was delightful bit of time and despite the hullabaloo at work, I went back with a sense that I could survive. But the picture has set off a wave of “can I run away” questions.

I don’t like being pulled to places I cannot go.  I mean I really don’t want to live on the Rez again despite missing the people there. I’m not sure there is a good solution to it, but perhaps I do need to visit more – more than the weddings and funerals that another sister gently chastised me for when I got there this last time. Perhpas it is as simple as that.

For now, skunk fear somewhat abated, perhaps a hot bath with lavender? Then a bit more sleep.

When I was still a child I held in my hands a slightly curved arc of yellowed bone that had small holes drilled into it. The holes swirled across the surface like a flattened, elongated S. It was a moon map that one of my relations had made long before my life began.  Keyed to a particular bit of horizon, the drilled holes marked the rising point of the moon as it wended its way over the course of a bit more than a month. I’ve never seen another, and have yet to make one myself, but I can still feel the bone in my hands. It made a huge impact on me, although at the time, and for decades after, I could not have said why. Even now, as I think I am beginning to understand it, its power over my imagination is still largely beyond my linguistic mind – as all good symbols should be.
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Sometimes not only are we not part of the conversation, sometimes we are not even on the same playing field. I think Brian O’Nolan may have felt like that as an author. When he submitted (as Flann O’Brien) The Third Policeman to his publishers it was rejected as too fantastic. The manuscript sat on his sideboard chastising him (as I think of it) for the next quarter century and during that time he told friends that enquired of its fate that the manuscript had been irretrievably lost. It wasn’t published until after his death, and now, of course, it is considered “a masterpiece.”
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This post started out to be about two things. The first is a book by Louis Owens called Bone Game and the second is a documentary called Genghis Blues.  I’ve known about Owens for a long time, and love his books. I rarely re-read but there are a few books that have comforts for me that reach so deep that re-reading seems mandatory. I have also known about Tuvan throatsingers for some years and have some CDs. There is even an article about it in Scientific American. I had, however, never heard of Paul Pena (horrifying I know) and never seen the movie Genghis Blues.  There was something about it, something that so strongly made me think of Owens that I dreamed about them last night and so here I am, figuring it out at the keyboard.
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In the last few weeks I have been rather ill and as a consequence I have been inside for much of that time. This morning, when I went outside just for the sake of being outside, I realized how much of a toll living in has on me.

You should understand that at various points in my life, starting when I was a teen, I have lived out.  I spent a couple of years on the road as a kid, just wandering around the country. Technically, I suppose I was homeless, although I could have gone to my mother’s house had she not been such a madwoman.  I have to tell you that it was not terrible. I was not suffering, in fact they were wondrous years full of discovery and learning.  As an adult I have lived in cars and vans (with children and pets) for long stretches of time. These were not terrible years either and both my children are better people for it too (even according to them). This is what I call living out.
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