Winter day's dreams

This made it into my other blog first, but I though it deserved to be put here as well. I'm not changing any phrasings or anything, for fear that I lose some of the correct details. Here it goes:

After lunch I was reading and fell asleep. Among other, less vivid things, I dreamed that I met with Boss F and told her what I really thought: that after a year and a half of pulling my hair out, losing sleep and weight (unintentionally, that is) and jeopardizing relationships over the stress from learning how to do my job well, I both knew how to run the place better than anyone, including she and her husband, and was being unfairly passed over for what I deserved. And since all of this was the case, I told her, I wouldn't be seeing her again.

After that, I dreamed that we were on a road trip, delivering furniture or something like that - Papa was driving and the rest of us were in the back of the truck, holding things down from sliding. Then something happened out in the mountains - the trailer came unhitched, perhaps - and we had to stop.

We went into an old abandoned farmhouse - plastered white walls, caked with soil and in need of a good scrub and repaint; wooden floors, lovingly sanded and finished and covered with woven rugs. The sun was setting and we carried candles around the house, exploring the three floors of the layout.

It was built into the side of a hill, with steep stairwells up and down taking up most of the space in the first room we entered. Upstairs, we could see a bathroom with a huge old claw-footed tub, and bedrooms clustered beyond. Downstairs was a cellar on level with the ground on the other side of the house, still stocked with shallow boxes filled with sand to store potatoes and apples, and heavy wooden doors leading out into a small dusty yard bounded by kitchen gardens, with fields and forests beyond. On the main level, as on the other two, the two wings of the house - great room, complete with a fireplace, ready with wood stacked beside it; and kitchen, with a large wood-burning stove, once-bright patterns painted on the walls and dry herbs and garlic still dangling within easy reach - reached forward to the left and right.

It's hard to explain how the footprint of the house was laid out, but try this: hold your arms out, at right angles to each other, and at 45 degrees to the center line of your body, as though you are turning your back to a cold wind and protecting someone in front of you. This "crooked" design kept the house protected the house from cold northern winds and created a small, sheltered microclimate at the back of the house, toward the south.

I know this is a long tangential post for what is still supposed to be just a food and exercise log, but it's very important that I write these details down and not forget them. This is what I need to do, and this is where I need to go. It's where I will be.

I'm trying as hard as I can to cement these pictures and ideas in my head, not to lose them as I do with so many (sleeping and waking) dreams. Oh Mama, help me out with this.

-N

Musings...

What do you want to do with your life?

That's the real question, isn't it? The big one that everyone struggles with, silently or aloud. Some of us answer it. You can see it in their smile, the glint in their eyes, the way they move their hands when describing what they do and who they are. They've beaten the System - that terrifying, shapeless entity whose entire purpose is to hold down the common man and force him into one of 6 billion pigeonholes.

The rest of us can either endlessly envy them, imagining ourselves stuck where we are by the nonexistent virtues of a heartless system where work is done for the purpose of being finished...

...or we can join them.

What do you want from life?

This question seems just as big and just as unanswerable, but it's a little easier to come up with general concepts, as we all really want the same thing. Health. Happiness. Safety. Security.

Love.

The problem, then, becomes how to obtain and nurture these qualities in our own lives. Very, very few people ever completely succeed. There's always something to trade or give up, or else the need to play along with the System just enough to avoid being noticed as an anomaly and stamped out.

But most of us never even get close to having to worry about that.

In my dreams, both sleeping and waking, I am happy. I know what lies beneath the walls of my home because I built them up from nothing but raw materials and waiting space. I sink my hands into cold, barren earth and call on my Mother to help me pull forth from it lush, green, healing-filled life. I take this life and give it freely to all those around me who are in desperate need of it, and take in return only what they ask to give me out of gratitude and love. Every morning, I wake in the arms of my best-beloved, who has chosen me as their One as I have chosen them. I am not threatened by any Man, Beast or System - not because they never threaten me, but because I have the confidence, knowledge and power to turn away all threats to me and mine. I am secure in my body and mind; in my home and land and my ability to keep them; in the love shared between me and my dear ones; in the dreams my Mother gives me and in the life that flows through me from everything and back into everything.

And now the third question arises. Which reality is the true one? To misquote a bit of ancient wisdom, am I a sad girl occasionally dreaming that she is happy, or a happy girl dreaming that she is sad?

The answer depends on me.

-N

BODY/MIND/a little SPIRIT: Just some loony musings

This morning I began to have a strange feeling. If I had to place it in my body I'd be torn between putting it in the pit of my stomach and at the nape of my neck, just at that place where if someone grabs you there, your shoulders automatically hunch up. A couple of times I felt physically ill. I shrugged it off on the fact that I'd just eaten egg salad one time and found dozens of nasty white grubs in the turf I was digging the other time - but these things do not usually affect me, especially the grubs - I've been digging and de-turfing for a while now and come across hundreds of the little buggers in the past few weeks, and this is the first time that the bile has actually risen in my throat at the sight of them. I even got rather weepy a couple of times - I was thinking about W, it's true, but I thought I'd gotten to a point where I can think about him without instantly breaking into tears. But most of the time it's just a sort of eerie quiet nagging - or, as a song that just played on my Pandora station puts it, "a vague feeling of dread." Very apt.

While poking around on the intarwubs today I noticed on the nifty little gadget that my friend now has on her blog that it is, in fact, a full moon tonight. Now, let me say that I have not been keeping track of this at all, but it does seem to me that I've noticed before, at times when I felt undefinably uneasy, that it turned out to be a full moon. I've definitely had many times when I just felt "off" for some reason, even way back when I was a young'un - I verbalised it then as a feeling that "something's going to happen" but nothing ever really did, that I recall.

Noticing this possible correlation today, I did some more poking of the wubs and, while I can't find any definitive scientific studies or that kind of thing, there are a lot of comments on public forums from people saying that they feel different around the full moon, particularly mothers saying that they can track their children's behavior by the full moon, or rather that they can guess when the moon is full by how their kid is acting (it makes a difference - if you look at the calendar and expect your child to act up around a certain time, I assume that you will be more likely to notice instances of acting up around this time). Other people say that they can never sleep the night of a full moon, and wake up with the night sweats in a cool room.

There's also the thought in the back of my mind that I am feeling this way because there is something I should be doing right now, something thatI am neglecting or forgetting, and this unease is just a reminder to do it. As soon as I sign off here and drink my warm milk, I think I'll go light some candles and ponder a bit, maybe figure out what that something is. I definitely want to keep tracking the mood and matching it up to the seasons and moon phases, if there is a match. I probably won't do it entirely here, but instead write it down in a notebook and summarise my findings. Goodnight for now.

-N