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

Just a quick muse...no pun intended

I know I need to do a huge recap of the past several months, and I promise that'll come soon. For now, though, it's been on my mind lately that tomorrow (or today, or the day after tomorrow, depending on your tradition) is not only Imbolc but also the first anniversary of my dedication and the start of my journey on this Path.

So this is just a little thing that caught my attention when I was doing some research on how to celebrate: Imbolc is sacred to the goddess Brighid, or Bride (that's bree-deh, not bryd, btw), who is, among other things, the patron deity of bards. My middle name is a family name, passed down through the years, with at least one child per generation being given it (right now I share the honor with my grandfather, uncle and little cousin, whom we call Birdie). The name we all share is "Baird," which, any good Scot can tell you, comes directly from those whose title it was, who roamed the country composing and performing poems and songs - that's right, bards.

That's all, just a little tidbit I found interesting. It gives me warm fuzzy shiveries inside :)

MIND/SPIRIT/something like that

So I might have to makeup a new topic heading for these posts that are not quite worldly enough to be MIND but not quite SPIRIT material, just random musings. MUSE, perhaps? Anyways...

I was talking to T the other day, and he brought up what I think is a very interesting thought. Basically it goes this: pretty much every task or project, large or small, that you takes on reflects somehow on your entire life, or rather how you want your life to be. Specifically, in my case, T wondered if all the work I'm doing on the garden is a metaphor for what I'm trying to do with my life in general.

When I started, the place was not quite a mess and had a decent basic setup, but it was a mix of boring bare dirt that was heavy and compacted from being ignored for too long and ugly invasive overgrown old foundation plantings. The first thing to do was to uproot and throw out everything I didn't want and dig up the soil, throwing everything in to an ugly, albeit temporary, chaos. This part is the most backbreaking and the least immediately satisfying - especially discovering bucketfuls of gravel in the soil that make it impossible to do quick work with the big shovel and force me to crouch down and pick each one out with a trowel - but even more so overall, as each day of work just reveals more of what still needs to be done. Deturfing the new flowerbed means I need to dig up all the newly-exposed soil there. Digging up and loosening the soil means I need to amend it and plant before the frost, as well as moving a good volume of soil somewhere else, as decompacting it means there seems like about twice as much as there used to be. And at the end of the day, it still looks far worse than I want it to, with mounds of bare soil everywhere - very unfinished.

Making all the plans for the future is a bit more fun, but still just as hard work. All the pretty plans and drawn-out diagrams, while certainly fun to put together, have to work with the existing space and criteria using plants that will work in the area, considering all colors and textures of each plant (flowering, fall color and any winter interest). I want the garden to be lovely and useful in all seasons, flowing gracefully through the year without any "down time," as well as being low-maintenance (taking care of itself, basically) and pleasing not only to those people who see and use it most often but everyone else who might come across it. It's going to take some years to get it to that point, and I realise that no one else is going to want to work on it, as least not as much as I'm willing to do, so I need to commit to this now.

I'm sure I could go on with this and find many more metaphors and probably some interesting revelations, but right now I need to go finish packing, as I'm leaving for a visit to Ohio early tomorrow morning. Yay!

-N