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

Signs, signs, everywhere are signs...

A week or two ago, I took advantage of the lovely weather to take a walk with a friend and shoot the breeze, just to share what was going on in our lives. Lately I've been quite worried about several of my friends, and I was letting my walking partner know all of my concerns, as they have been in the forefront of my thoughts. I looked down at the sidewalk and saw a playing card at my feet - the Queen of Hearts. A bell rang in the back of my mind that this meant something, but I couldn't remember just what, so I picked up the card and put it in my wallet, planning on deciphering it later. When we were retracing our steps to end the walk, I noticed another card on the ground near where I'd found the first one. Wondering if this might be the second half to whatever message I was supposed to be getting, I picked it up as well, even though it was soaked through...although it had barely been sprinkling. It was another Queen of Hearts.

Now I could have overlooked finding the first card alone as an obvious coincidence - it was a neighborhood with plenty of kids, who could have been playing with a deck of cards and forgotten to clean them up. But the second card being exactly the same as the first, as well as both cards being directly in my path, gives me a bit more pause about the whole situation and makes me more inclined to believe that this really is the universe trying to let me know something.

The Queen of Hearts corresponds to the Queen of Cups in tarot, and every source I saw during my research mentioned the word "compassion." This card denotes someone who cares a lot about others, which is of course a good thing, unless it's taken too far. There's the possibility of this card showing up in a situation when someone is putting their cares about others above their own cares, sometimes even to a dangerous level. I don't think I'm in any danger of completely forgetting myself for others, but there is the fact that, when my friend and I started talking and she asked me what had been going on in my life, the first thing I thought of was my worries about my friends, NOT what had been happening to me.

I know I'm being told something. I think it's something along the lines of "lighten up a little bit!" or "don't worry so much about what you can't change!" or even "remember yourself!" I'd welcome any other views on the matter, especially the bit about the second card being all wet. Totally can't get that part.

In other news, I'm making yogurt at least once a week and it is better every time :D

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