đOranges of My Heartđ
Wherein I go all Indiana-Jones on my psyche.
Egypt.
Stone.
Tomb.
Sarcophagus.
Ancient artifacts.
Customs.
Roofing.
Falling.
Another dream:
I am excavating a pyramid in Egypt. It is Ng, another woman, a local guy and myself. I explore passageways. No treasure. Just interesting things. Artifacts stacked everywhere.
Find some kind of sarcophagus. Sealed. Big and shiny, covered with blue and gold. It reminds me of a paper maché we made in 4th grade. Breaking open it is full of fresh oranges. We bag up and haul them all out. We discuss how they are worth a fortune.
The exit is at the bottom of a looong steep stone ramp. I tell the girls to wait snd let me carry down the heavy bags everyone waits and I make several trips. At one point I pass a roofing crew and I remind them all to be careful, not to fall off the high ramp. An old boss, DO (now dead) is in the group, he says, âMe? Fall off? Wish someone would what reminded me of that in New York. Would have saved me a lot of suffering.â
I do not know the NY reference, but in the 30 years I knew him, heâd fallen off roofs several times, once almost dying.
I get back to the top but the stranger with us insists on carrying her bag down herself. I spy a customs agent who stares at me. I insist I take her bag and start to walk away when she tackles me, snatches the bag and we both tumble downed the long ramp. Her bag spills open and all the brilliant orange splay everywhere.
The dream ends with us all picking them up.
âThe wound is the place where the Light enters you.â â Rumi
The pyramids of Egypt and the Americas always fascinated me. These structures, similar but separated by 3 millennia and an entire planet, survived when the building cultures did not. Big piles of stone, it seems, are quite indelible.
I always wonder if the similarities are physics or some common intelligence. As in, are they shaped the way they are because that is the most efficient way to make a large monolithic structure that stands the test of time and may be constructed with rudimentary equipment, or was there a shared knowledge the builders carried from a common ancestry?
Like the Tootsie Roll Pop, the world may never know.
Still, I find them interesting. Mesoamerican structures are more fun to draw because the iconography is more organic and, to me, more interesting.
Pyramids: big tombs, essentially. So my dream is set in a graveyard and surrounded by memoribilia of the interred. Who? When? Who knows, maybe iâm diving into dead parts of my pscyche. That sounds intelligent, letâs assume this.
Discovering my grade-school sarcophagus, inside should be dust and bones, but instead, itâs full of life, brilliance and color. Food: the opposite of death, it is the sustenance that keep us going and in the case of a good orange, very, very enjoyable.
My house burned down in 4th grade. Itâs also the year that my shoes got so bad, I had to wear my momâs, which happened to fit perfectly just then. I was so embarrassed. They were girls shoes. We were homeless and living with grandma.
Yet, what i found buried there, even connected to an old wound, was good, enriching, and beautiful.
It should be noted that I thought that paper machĂ© sarcophogus was one of the most beautiful things I ever made. I donât know what color blue we used, but in my memory is is positively ALIVE!
So much good and wonder is in us!
The dream resolution is interesting in that it pulled in old memories of dead friends and the solution was one of my favorite story-telling devices: working together to solve a problem that benefits us all. In a word: cooperation.
My insistence to take over was divisive and thoughtless, and didnât give the other parties any agency. As a result, an accident occurred. Think of others, helping them isnât doing for them, itâs working together.
The appearance of the dead friend with his commentary matches his insistence that he always knew best. That might be just a âvoice of wisdomâ thing or it might represent some resentment I always harbored against someone who was inadvertently taking on a fatherly roll.
Roofing was 25 years of my life and represented a lot of anxiety for me when I was doing it for a living in my teens and early 20âs. Roofers exist in that space in life where they are doing the work of necessary business, and are constantly on the edge of danger. Warning them might just be me saying hey, this is serious, you could really get hurt. Really make a mess, which i did.
it might even be teh NY reference was me dredging up dangerous actions when I travel. Thoughtless acts that cost me dearly on occasion. In other words, when someplace new, take care you donât let your guard down and do things youâll later regret.
Like spilling your oranges down the ramp.
Metaphor much?
What weâre filled with is not just beauty, but wonder and joy. Here, my subconscious painted it to look like oranges: nourishing and attractive. And it seems, worth a fortune. And something we all carry around in us even though we usually forget itâs there, or ignore it intentionally.
Extracting it is the difficult part. We have to choose to do it and dig through some darkness to find it. Wander through the graveyard of our hearts, if you will.
We might even make a mess in the process.
But thatâs fine. Messes can be cleaned up and in them, we find those treasures we thought were lost entirely. And who of us doesnât love discovering treasure?
The best part of my dream? I wasnât doing it alone. We all have our tribes. Some are born to us, some are found. But we love them. We want them to succeed. And they want the same for us.
Dream work, lets the team work.
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âMay your seas be wide enough for wonder, your harbor always waiting, and your light never fail when another soul is searching.â â The Lantern Keeper