Photo by Kerem Yucel

I was the audience for a show being put on by a theater group. They were staging a symbolic drama in which a totem represented each of the four directions. I recognized the symbolic forms they were using and could see the logic in their choice of images. There was an audience participation element, and as I was one of only two people in the audience, that part was my job. I was irritated by it and thought, I’d really prefer to be one of the performers, an equal in the performance.

Once that was decided, I was backstage in what appeared to be a locker room, helping to put away props. The head of the group was a man, a doctor, who was being played in my dream by a famous actor. There were some inside jokes about this, and this man, who was fond of puns, made a crack about having a “mystic nose,” which always leads him in the right direction.

My fellow audience member and I walked through a door and found ourselves in a hallway full of doors, each with a label that had the potential to be misleading. Each door led to a different time period, a different reality. But the label never matched what was actually on the other side. I recognized the potential for getting lost, as the labels were not trustworthy, and all doors looked the same. Then I realized there was a smaller label on each door, by the handle, that identified who was in charge of and somehow unwittingly creating the reality on the other side. The reality we’d been in was the doctor’s, according to the label. In my mind’s eye, I was able to see some scenes from his life playing out, which gave me some insight into a central conflict that had colored his world. Knowing this, I felt confident we would not be lost in this hallway.

I thought of the doctor and his “mystic nose,” that leads in the right direction. I thought of the secret about the labels marking the doors and the way different realities were created, and thought, perhaps this is what the “mystic knows.”

Just over a week ago, while we were doing the annual holiday round of family visits, the Photographer surprised me with a beautiful and very thoughtfully chosen engagement ring.

I still love that this world I live in can still surprise me with how beautiful and unexpected it is. I love that the Photographer can still surprise me with how beautiful and unexpected he is also.

- Madeleine L’Engle, “After Anunciation”

The Photographer and I are finishing up all the things that must be finished up for the year, looking forward to spending Christmas with my family, then New Years with his. It’s a wild time. As usual, nothing has gone as expected. Projects I thought I’d have finished long before now have found ways to drag on, and somehow the thought of carrying them over into a new year is bothering me more than I would have thought. I’ve realized there are definitely things in my life I’d like to get rid of, and with that awareness, I feel myself entering a familiar period of knowing I need to make some real changes, but not yet being able to see how they will be possible. That feeling used to terrify me. Now I’ve been through it enough times to be more comfortable with the trajectory. Certain changes seem huge and impossible, until somehow, suddenly, they don’t. I’ve gotten better at trusting that the needed shift will happen.

This is actually a perfect place to be, psychospiritually speaking, for the Advent season, which is about waiting for the birth of God. It’s about saying yes to mystery and the unknown, to the idea that the limited, frail, human self is also carrier of the divine. Madeleine L’Engle’s memoir The Irrational Season begins with a discussion of Advent. She writes, “The Nativity is a time to take courage. How brave am I? Can I bear, without breaking apart, this extraordinary birth?”

I remember an autumn several years ago when I became aware of the necessity to do something I really didn’t think I could do. (Perhaps necessity is too strong a word. I certainly could have stayed in the familiar, uncomfortable and stagnant though it was.) For a time I felt a strange, restless energy and couldn’t sleep. One day I drove a long way out and hiked for hours up on the bluffs overlooking the river. When I came down, what had seemed impossible was suddenly not only viable, but likely.

Looking back, this autumn has seemed to me about deep change, about walking a path through the illogical, not-knowing spaces, about occupation. Perhaps this irrational season is that wild, restless time before change happens, before something of the divine breaks through again in a new, suddenly possible way.

Photo by Jean Carneiro

In Advent and Psychic Birth, author Mariann Burke shares a story C.G. Jung told about a dialogue with a Native American. The man said his tribe lived on the roof of the world and helped the sun travel across the sky. “We do this not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. If we were to cease practicing our religion, in ten years the sun would no longer rise.”

Burke cautions us not to dismiss this idea. She links the Advent imagery of emptiness and parthenogenesis with ancient winter solstice practices wherein the world died and was reborn. Humans actively participated in this process, and in the chaos between the death of the old world and the birth of the new.

Although we no longer think of this time as the literal death and rebirth of the world, it cannot be denied that we actively participate in the creation and continual re-creation of the world we live in, through ideas, beliefs, words and actions. Our making of meaning shapes the collective story as it unfolds, re-visions the past and projects the future. How would it change things to consider this as the man in Jung’s story does? To think that the living out of our lives, day to day, is a part of the making and remaking of the world?

As a younger person I remember at times feeling dwarfed and intimidated by a culture that often didn’t seem to reflect what I valued at all. The temptation was to hide the aspects of myself that clashed with that culture, to avoid conflict and protect myself. That temptation still surfaces often. When I was contemplating working as a therapist, for instance, I confessed to an older therapist whose work I very much respected that I questioned whether or not I wanted to go into a profession that had so easily embraced ideas I thought were irresponsible and reductionistic. She challenged me to consider the idea that one can change things just by being in the world and that it wasn’t always as important to fight and defend different values as it was simply to live them.

Photo by Barun Patro

“I believe I will never quite know
Though I play at the edges of knowing
truly I know
our part is not knowing.”

- Mary Oliver, from “Bone”

I wrote my last post in response to a vivid dream in which an analyst who works with dreams helped a friend of mine who suffers from a serious illness. Last weekend, I attended a conference where this same analyst, Robert Bosnak, lectured on and demonstrated his method of dreamwork. It was incredibly powerful stuff.

I was not really familiar with Bosnak’s work at all at the time of the dream, but when I wrote about it, the dream seemed connected to the idea of not-knowing. This turned out to be the cornerstone of Bosnak’s work, an idea he emphasized again and again throughout his talks. We never really know what a dream “means,” or even, actually, who the dreamer is. To attempt to “know,” we reduce a dream (and truthfully, most experience) to a readily understood message or interpretation, a process by which we lose much that is of value. It reminded me of Zen Master Seung Sahn, who said, “I don’t even teach Buddhism. I only teach don’t know.”

I must have needed to hear this in a big way. My dreaming mind could not even wait for Mr. Bosnak’s lecture but had to dream a preview first, as if to say to my waking mind, “Hey, you, pay attention!”

When I woke up I remembered that Bosnak does intend to do a demonstration, at the conference, with another friend who has a chronic physical condition, and that in fact he specializes in working with people with these types of problems.

I thought about the role dreams played years ago when I developed a mystery illness that took awhile to shake, but finally did, with the help of a very skilled and patient healer. I remembered how, recently, I woke up from a dream in which I was sitting in his waiting room and realized it had probably been too long since my last visit, so I made an appointment. I have no doubt that my dreams tell me things about my physical body my waking mind doesn’t know.

Lately I’ve been struggling with understanding how, or if, healing occurs with some of my therapy clients. I see most people weekly, and sometimes people feel better, sometimes worse. While we hope and work for substantial improvement over time, it can be hard to tell, when you’re in the midst of it, whether or not things are going in a good direction. It’s easy to think we’re not really doing anything, especially since the process of therapy isn’t generally linear. People do not get better in a predictable way. Healing takes a circuitous path, often one unique to the individual. I’ve seen and experienced it firsthand far too many times not to have faith in it, but it’s still easy to forget when a client has a bad week and I think, perhaps I’m not really being helpful. What do I really know anyway?

What I learned from my healer is pretty well summed up by something he said to me one day when I’d had a particularly bad week, and neither one of us knew why I wasn’t getting better. He said something like, I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m willing to keep working as long as you are. He had faith in the process and a willingness not to know, and ultimately, it worked where so many other attempts had failed. (I probably learned more about being a healer from that one exchange than in a year of graduate school.)

The image that stays with me from my recent dream is that of someone standing on the injured back of my friend, who could easily and happily hold that weight. The feeling that stays with me is that fundamentally, real, serious healing does happen, and often the path is through the illogical, the dream world, and the not-knowing.

We understand life through stories, and the TV raster story was exactly my father’s kind of tale. The underlying plot line was that if you delve into the physical realities of the world and learn how things work, really cool things become possible. It’s a good story.

Today I was reading the ongoing coverage of Occupy Wall Street. An NPR commentator noted that the media is having trouble with this story because they don’t know what to call it. Is it a movement? A political act? Typically we’d expect for there to be concrete demands and conditions under which the occupation would be ended. But there is another sort of rhetoric coming up, one that I infinitely prefer. One journalist characterized the occupation as a great act of “political imagination.” Naomi Klein spoke of a whole different level of change in addressing the occupiers when she said, “I’m talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand.”

In a previous blog post, I wondered if the occupation was a sign that it was time to reconsider what could change. Today, I think we have an opportunity to change our underlying story, to question the values we’ve been living by, not the ones we say we live by, but the ones our behavior indicates we live by. That level of change is as much about living those values ourselves as it is about demanding the same of our politicians and financial leaders.

Taking a good hard look at the story we’ve been culturally married to, the single hardest truth I see is that we’ve long believed that money is the single most important thing. We may say it’s family, but many of us work ridiculous hours and still bring the laptops and Blackberries home. We may say it’s religion, morality or ethics, but we still buy the cheapest products around, even if they’re made cheap by immorally and unethically exploiting workers overseas. We may prefer not to support companies who took government bailout money and then gave their executives huge bonuses, but if they offer cheaper insurance, the money trumps the objection. I’m not writing this with an intent to shame. It takes energy to fight the dominant story, and I certainly don’t always win that fight in my own life. But if I had to pick the number one aspect of our story that needs to be rewritten, this would be it.

I’d vote for our next project of political imagination to be this: To break the stranglehold of money – politically, culturally, and personally.

- Albert Einstein

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations have been at the forefront of my mind for days. While demonstrations and sit-ins played a very significant role in the creation of change decades ago, I think I stopped having any faith in these tactics as a tool when they failed to have any impact whatsoever on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time, I remember thinking, this can’t last with so many people so clearly against it. But it has lasted… and lasted, and lasted.

Like most of the demonstrators, I’m thoroughly disgusted with both parties and our whole political system, not to mention much of the media, which is more focused on ratings and entertainment than journalism with integrity. I’m disgusted with our system of campaigning and elections and with the idea that corporations are people. (I work for a large corporation, and it is a lot of things, but human isn’t one of them.)

My sincere hope is that the Occupy Wall Street movement might be the beginning of a different kind of thinking, one that, as Einstein might say, moves us to a different level where we might actually solve some of these significant problems. In a recent interview, Naomi Klein was asked for her thoughts on the criticism being leveled at the demonstrators because they have no coherent message or list of demands. She said, it would be a mistake to draw up a list of demands before they really know how big an impact they might be able to have.

That idea left me feeling hopeful. Perhaps a new way of thinking is evolving. Perhaps that is the tool that could be wielded to accomplish in our time the level of change that was accomplished in other times. Perhaps this is  the time to set aside the familiar list of proposed policies, debates and politicians to look again and what could change.

overhear on the bus, God
in the details….

- Elizabeth Alexander, from “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

In a dialogue with Krista Tippett, poet Elizabeth Alexander talked about words that shimmer, and how her young children would stop and ask her to repeat certain exceptionally beautiful words. It made me think of my nieces, at Christmas, discovering words together and particularly loving the word sock, repeating it over and over to each other, lingering on the S and the K.

We mostly lose that attention to the feel of language as we get older, but traces of it still remain. When James Lipton asks his Inside the Actor’s Studio guests what their favorite word is, some still answer with a word that has some music in it, or a particularly interesting arrangement of sounds. Meryl Streep confessed to asking her daughter this question before the show and then using her answer: coconut milk.

Elizabeth Alexander and Krista Tippett discussed the extent to which poetry was a necessity, especially in difficult times. Alexander said it must be necessary, because it’s as old as humanity itself. We have poems dating back to the beginning of language, just as we have images painted on cave walls.

This makes me wonder if we didn’t invent language as much for the beautiful feel of words in our mouths as for the meaning the words carry, and if marrying the two wasn’t one of the more brilliant things human beings ever did.

It occurred to me today that this is true for me too. On such visits, we share experience and information. We observe. We learn.

Last week, I had the rare opportunity to visit an old friend I hardly ever see anymore. We were quite close many years ago, and now, it’s one of those friendships where we may not see each other for years, but we somehow manage to pick up right where we left off. Over dinner, she asked me about how my work was going, and how it was balancing multiple jobs, multiple careers even. It was an ordinary question, and I started to answer it in an ordinary fashion. But as I talked, I heard myself include some specifics about exactly how I felt about certain aspects of my life, what I wanted to do more of and less of, and what I saw as a temporary means to an end vs. what I hoped would be a permanent part of my life. Anyone could have asked me that question, and many have, but for some reason, my answer to this particular friend was different.

Thinking of this today, I remembered my nieces at the beach. I remembered watching Addie open her mouth in the ocean to find out what seawater tastes like and Nora grabbing my hand to pull me to the water at sunset, saying “Look!”

There are things only certain people can show us. It’s shared experience that breeds this. I sat across the table from my old friend, and a whole vocabulary of shared experience came back to me. This was a person with whom I’d practiced figuring out my hopes and dreams from a young age. We saw each other make choices, try and fail, revise plans and start again. She brought that knowledge of me with her, and it informed her question.

I can imagine a time years from now when these three beautiful girls might come together. They’ll discuss their lives, successes and failures, new plans. They’ll offer perspectives. And whether or not they think of it in the moment, they’ll remember things like jumping on the bed together, making sandcastles, and tracing their feet with crayons. And when they start asking each other the big questions, like are you happy with your life, and what is it you want, perhaps it will seem a little easier to find answers. Perhaps those developmental leaps will keep happening.