Journal November 1991

The experts say two things: grieve and mourn lost childhood and avoid addiction to pain. How

does one tell the difference? Do I have any more answers or just more questions? I write and

pray incessantly. My journal comes with me no matter where I go.

I travel for Alberta Education and so spend many nights writing in my hotel room.

 

 

I was never a child

I became an old person

torn by life’s pain

before I became.

How does it feel not to be wary?

To be warm, open, vulnerable and trusting?

I grew up afraid

and never knowing why.

Always protecting myself

against closeness

Always denying myself joy.

A ceramic rosebud

Searching for dew and sunshine.

Tonight, the aurora borealis is unsullied awe. Alberta winter’s nightly miracle. Dark skies

mystical luminescence. Darkness and light. Heaven and earth. Have we ever lived among the

magnetic wonders of this light? Images of mammoth hunters crossing windswept open spaces on their way to the feast.

Earth reflecting earth. Shaggy, wild men and women in joyous simplicity.

Unhindered by intellectual philosophy, urged on by the unbidden instinct to wander.

That night I dream.

Restoration of the Feminine November 1991

An excerpt from Authoring Self: Journey through Dreams to the Feminine, 2019, p. 89

In the dream I meet many women before entering a chapel. I dance and sing twice. Then I levitate in the open cathedral hall. I notice a broken statue underneath the snow. I am leaving the cathedral and finding my way into a room where two governments are explaining the rationale for war. I am disappointed at not finding one of my brothers there. Just as I enter, I overhear someone say, “He talks and says nothing. A lot of words—no meaning.” I look around the room full of people—not able to see who I am looking for.I think I am looking for my eldest brother, Jerry. I am trying to get to the war. I return, I think, to   the broken white statue. I am repairing it where there are four broken pieces of alabaster, shaped like a ψ. Two are at the foot. Then a priest comes. My brother Tony and I are searching through moldy bread trying to find one good piece. On a huge, tall wall there is a large very white crucifix. I begin dusting the wall.

The Eucharist is celebrated as the bread of life. It has always held a good deal of spiritual

nourishment for me. Plainly speaking, the dream tells me my spiritual life is frozen and moldy.

When I do return to the dream several months later, I barely skim the surface in my

discussion with a kindly nun, a second cousin, at Providence Centre in Edmonton, Alberta. She

is a trained spiritual director. I am the Guardian, the Reservist.

It’s 26 years later, actually 2017 before I realize that the feminine dancing, singing and levitating, the broken alabaster and the huge crucifix on the stark white wall were ‘overlooked’ in my initial work with this dream.

To be continued …