Destiny and Dreaming

“Everyone enters the world gifted and seeded with meaning.”

~Michael Meade

What a new year it has been. Dark winter skies shimmer starlight. A new crescent moon tangos with Venus on the horizon. Solar storms pulse, bringing the sun’s messages to our earth. Charged plasma particles electrify our atmosphere, dance through the magnetic field—provide the silent score for swirling, leaping aurora borealis. We stand between the Chinese new year of the Dragon and the Celtic cross-quarter day Imbolc—the day the seeds first stir in the earth again after winter’s stillness.  And it is this particular potent constellation of events that has me thinking about the dance between fate and destiny and dreaming.

In my corner of the universe, the flavor of these times is intense, poignant, and breathtakingly beautiful. I find myself in a continual state of AWE at the precious mystery of this life. Of late, high-stakes soul-stories run through the lives of friends and family members without pause—sickness, break-ups, mysterious diagnoses, magical meet-ups, heart-wrenching synchronicities, raw beauty, miraculous healings, the unmistakable answering of prayers.  All of it is present—the full range of human experience, with the volume cranked up so loud the walls are shaking.  Whatever the flavor of the intensity, these soul stories seem to be working on us from the inside out—bringing us potently and unmistakably in touch with our vulnerability and our courage. Calling us to continue to show up for what shows up.

Cour-age: strength of heart

It is this strength of heart that compels us to tell our whole stories, to share all of ourselves, to admit that we love deeply, need each other desperately, and long to know the ways we belong to community, to earth, to cosmos, to ourselves. These times offer us a powerful invitation to re-home—to individually and collectively find paths (like new neural networks) to ways of being that are surprising, new, ancient and familiar all at once. 

And this re-homing involves the willingness to welcome paradox— and its ensuing gorgeous, befuddling, life-renewing tango of opposites–or seeming opposites. How do we attend to our own truths while staying in intimate relationship with other?  How do we fully embody our power, strength, ferocity AND our tenderness and vulnerability? How do we surrender to the mysterious movements of life and fully take responsibility for co-creating and co-dreaming our lives?  How do we dance with destiny, fate, and full, uninhibited freedom, choice, and awakened possibility? How do we acknowledge and live into our unique soul-symbol while fully understanding and experiencing our limitless essence that knows no symbols or signs?

A few months, Michael Meade came to town. A story-telling master and word-smith, he spoke at length on fate and destiny—about “beautiful accidents” and “perfect mistakes” that shake and shape our life.  (His life-changing beautiful accident came in the form of a “mistaken gift”—a book of mythology.) In his talk, he shared that the aphorism “chip of the old block” refers to the soul’s relationship to the tree of life.  Each human being is a “chip off the world tree”—each soul with its own unique sign or etching that is an essential piece of the great story of creation. (In the beginning there was the word, and then the universe began speaking in tongues.)

Ahh, but as this wild human world would have it, when we are born, we cross over that river of forgetting—and after that crossing, we don’t always have access to the soul-symbol we were born with.  But, regardless of our forgetting, we are forever and always “seeded with meaning”—hence, our searching for that which is literally within us.

Michael also shared that the Greek word “apocalypse” translates to “lifting of the veil” or “revelation.” This sheds some light on these times we live in and our cultural stories around apocalypse.  Perhaps these are the times of Revelation—the revealing of who we truly are. Perhaps this is a time where the etching on our “chip” is more visible—as we come to see how can offer ourselves up to this process of re-homing.  Perhaps, in these “apocalyptic” times, we are invited to “see in the dark”—to see what we previously could not see.

Dreamer or Dreamed?

And there is another important thread to this tapestry that has to do with our relationship to dreaming.  Are we the dreamers or the dreamed, or both? Recently, a dear friend recommended a film called The Edge of Dreaming, a documentary about a woman (who is also the film-maker) who began having seemingly prophetic dreams about her own death. All of the signs in her day world seemed to be pointing to the truth of these dreams—that she would die young and that there was nothing she could do to stop the inevitable freight train of fate. After having these prophetic dreams, she suddenly became ill, and entered a downward spiral that weakened her, threatened her life, and had her wondering if, in fact, death was knocking loudly at her door. But something in her own soul questioned this “fate”—and she decided to work with a shaman to dive more deeply into the dreams. Through this work with herself, she realized that she could change her dream.  She saw that she was the dreamer and the dream—and in that moment she knew that when her dream changed, she would have her life back. Weeks later, she mysteriously healed from her illness.  The doctors were baffled. In this moment in one woman’s life, the dreamer and the dreamed merged into one fluid gesture.

The World Tree

So perhaps this gives us another view on “prophecies”—prophecy is a way we read the dream that we are all dreaming—we tune into the momentum and see the current trajectory of the arrows of this life. But we can change the dream. In fact, we ARE changing this dream.  We are reading the words inscribed on our souls. We are re-membering.  We are coming home to our selves and to each other.  And we are living into our destiny, whatever that will mean for each of us– for all of us. We do have a choice.  Wherever we are, whatever is happening, whatever we are dreaming, whatever is dreaming us—we can show up with our courage, love, vulnerability and fierceness and say—yes, I am willing to meet what IS.  We can see the arrows shot from the bows of fear and pain and suffering, and say, I am willing to dream the new dream.  Whatever it takes, I am willing.  After all, we are made for this.  Chips off the old block.  The world tree is dreaming us. And we are dreaming the world tree.

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