The Wellspring greets me with her calm smile, cups my face in her hands in blessing. I am so grateful for her, for her presence in my life, her steadfastness. I want to gift her. I reach into my chest and pull out the pearl of my heart and rest it in her hands. In her hands it becomes moonlight. Everything is bathed in possibility.
OOO
It is difficult to express, starts out messy, dreaming of pockets. I am sloppy and shedding and everything hurts.
I find my way to the Wellspring and ask for help with the ache in my head. I see my heart incased in a cube of clear plastic.
“Why have you done that?” the Wellspring asks.
I don’t know. I can’t see anything clearly with my heart like that. How can I know anything with my heart like that? I want help restoring it. Please.
Someone breathes fire over it to melt the plastic. Who is that? The River Dragon? He swallows it up. Now my heart is in the belly of the River Dragon and my heart-space is an empty hole.
I cry out to the Wellspring, “I think I need a healing. There is an ache in me but I don’t know what it is.”
The Grandmother comes, grinning and nodding. She will lead me, she knows where we need to go. She is old, but the bear will carry her. I thank her and rub ointment into her achey joints before we set off, knees and ankles, feet and shoulders. She scrambles up onto the bear, sitting almost side-saddle, with one leg hanging down and one knee cocked up in front of her, her small body hunched and leaning forward over that bent leg, eager to be off.
We walk along a path in grasses grown shoulder height and higher. Golden and blowing. There is a fierce wind rising. We duck our heads and lean into it, all the while the Grandmother is cackling, “Oh-ho, she really doesn’t want to be found. Hehe.”
It seems the harder things get, the more the Grandmother laughs.
We come to a small wood and in the wood, a clearing, sheltered from the wind. A very small child is there, industrious and quiet. She is playing in the dirt. She is building something – a mud wall to defend herself from attack. When she sees us step out of the trees, she cracks into a scream of sheer terror. She is terror. Her scream fills the world.
I want to take her in my arms, to hold and comfort her but cannot think how to approach without doing damage. I stand facing her. The bear circles around behind. I know he is offering her comfort and protection, but she doesn’t know that. The Grandmother comes over the top of the wall, like a commando, right down onto the girl with an old quilt. She catches the child up and swaddles her, hands her over to me to rock and suckle. The terror subsides. She yields to the comfort of my body.
I know who she is. She is that little bit of me that said it wasn’t time yet to be born, that little bit that wanted to wait, that wasn’t ready when circumstances dictated that, ready or not, the time had come.
She is the bit that’s willing to wait until ripe. The bit that knows what’s right for me and will stand by that knowing.
When I went forth, she stayed behind. All this time, I have been making my way without her. I have missed her sorely.
Holding her gently now, I honor her knowing and steadfastness. I welcome her back to myself. How good it is to stand with her. She rests in me. I rest in the Grandmother. The Grandmother rests in the branching embrace of the ancestors.
It is good.
Little Bit touches my arm. She has the sweetest little frog hands.
OOO
I went to the Wellspring and couldn’t hold my shape at all. I lifted my hands in supplication and they melted away.
“Why have you stayed away?” she asked.
I didn’t know. Sometimes I lose the way. Sometimes it seems impossible. I didn’t know. I had been away a long long time.
Bear came but wasn’t interested in going anywhere. He lumbered onto his side and rested himself on the ground. “Too late to begin anything now,” he said.
I didn’t know what I meant to do, but knew I must do something.
I took up my coil of black braid rope, attached one end to a tree, the other to me, and I lowered myself down into a fissure in the ground. Down down down into the dark. And there I found Night Hawk, wounded and alone. I took his body onto mine. I cradled him, wrapped myself around him. I rested my hands on the place where the blood was running out. I didn’t know what else to do. I gave him water. A slice of apple. A bit of cookie. I held him and rocked. I set small balls of luminance above us in the dark.
After a time I heard a calling and carried him down and again further down to a lake within the stone. I set him adrift on a small disk of a craft. I had to let him go. He drifted out into the darkness and dissolved.
Frantic at the loss, I collected a skin of water from the lake and carried it up to the surface. I poured it out onto the ground and Night Hawk bloomed from that spot. All of his beauty lived in his skin again. He grinned at me and touched my cheek and wrapped me up close to the beauty heart of himself.
“Don’t leave me,” I cried into his chest. “Don’t leave me.”
He crooned my name and rocked me as if it wasn’t me who’d done all the leaving.
OOO
I do not see the river. Or hear it. Or smell it.
It is dark where I am, the ground hard and scrabbly under foot, the sky blanked by cloud. I do not even know which direction to walk in. I don’t know how to go. So I sit.
I long for the Ferryman, but do not call out for him, have no voice for calling. I long for the Ferryman and find a gift in my hand, a small river rock, smooth and cool. I fold my fingers over it. I am flooded with courage.
I will sit and learn whatever it is this darkness will teach me.
OOO
She lifts my chin with one broad finger, adjusts the tilt of my head so that my spine flows down like water and my shoulders breathe. “That’s better,” she says.
She is dun colored, stone defined in broad strokes, simple planes. She shows me the dance of preparation to do before I visit next time. And after. A willowy swooping of arms around in a great circle.
She is dancing with me, arm along my arm, lift for lift, bend to bend.
I try to remember my question, my intent, what brought me here.
How do I recover my strength? my resilience.
She cups my hands and they fill with water. The water comes from me. The cupping calls it out. “You forgot this part.” She reminds me of a bit of a dream where water gushed from my mouth like a fountain, filling and overflowing my hands as I cupped them in offering.
The water of life flows through me, strong. Strong. I begin to rock back and forth. There is singing in my throat.
She begins to dance in a circle around me. A slow stomping dance. When she stomps the ground, all the hard stuck parts break and fall open. Water flows. She is the water bringer. Water from stone.
“It’s always there,” she says. “You just need to call it.”
OOO
I have made myself a bed in the beard of a sleeping giant. I rise, dance and scatter flowers across the rise and fall of his breath. Then I settle back and sleep some more.
I might be wearing bells and making music with every step, every reach, every turn. But not today. Today I move like owl wings. Like silence through darkness. Precise and unknowable.
OOO
I go to the Wellspring as a softness in the air, the blurred edge between leaf green and sky gray. She receives me with a smile. I see suddenly that she is my buddha nature. There she sits, so serene. The water of life flows through her. The wall of the fountain I have built to catch and hold the flow is not something she needs. It is for my benefit, giving me a place to submerge myself when I need to, and I often need to. I am grateful to her and to this place she provides me, this place to go.
I want to gift her to demonstrate my gratitude. I hang small clear drops from her arms and fingers, like raindrops, catching light. They hang on her like celebration.
“I’ve come to meet August,” I say.
“Make yourself ready.”
It is difficult to move quickly. Every surface I touch absorbs me a little. I sink in. It seems to be the nature of this day, all the edges blurred. I am not depleted by the merging, far from it. I am energized by the humming force in the ground. Feels like being plugged in, like being recharged.
I draw water from the fountain to wash my face. I comb my hair. My hair is full of sand and the tinkling rattle of shells and the soft bodies of small sea creatures. I dip my head into the fountain to release everything that is caught in my hair. While it is still wet, I braid it in two long braids with thin red ribbons woven in. I am ready.
I kneel and rest my forehead to the ground. I call the spirit of August to me.
August is big. Giant. Impossible to see all at once. He rests his hand on the ground before me and I climb into his palm. His hand is like a boat. I settle into the cup of it. The pace of his movement as he lifts me is unfathomable. “This isn’t going to work. The difference in scale is too huge.” I close my eyes.
August laughs, an easy sound. I’m on the ground and he’s squatting before me. He’s man-sized. A shaggy man, wearing loose clothing that flaps when he moves. “Hello, you,” he says.
“Hello.”
“Want to see a secret?”
Of course I do. “I have been collecting secrets to string into a necklace. See?” I show him the pouch at my waist where I have been collecting the small shiny things.
“Come on then,” he says and leads me onto a narrow path through the green.
The path is narrow but well-worn. I wonder how such a well-used way could lead to something secret. What it leads to is a road. I stand in the middle of the open road, drenched in disappointment. What could possibly be secret about a road?
I hear August laughing again. He is not in the road with me, but back a few feet in the green. I return to him. “Look,” he whispers.
Through the screen of leaves I see something coming down the road. It is a bird the size of a small house. He lifts his feet and sets them down in regal nonchalance. Deep blue and green feathers cascade back from the crown of his head. His beak is curved, thick and cream colored. He is walking down the middle of the road. He is magnificent. Other birds follow, though none as large, every one is shimmering. A small tiger weaves in and out of the bird legs. It’s a parade.
I stand up to get a better look, but when I do, all I see is car traffic. When I kneel beside August I see the parade of magical beasts. “Wow.”
“I know, right?”
“It’s all different.”
“Exactly.” He beams as if I’d just won a prize.
Everything changes. Nothing is stuck fast. All you have to do to see something completely else is shift your point of view. This is what August is showing me.
“How’m I going to tell this? None of it sticks together.”
August falls down laughing at that because of course that’s the whole point. Everything shifts and changes. Always. It’s a beautiful thing.
OOO
I went to the Wellspring. I was liquid and flowing. I was Wellspring. We laughed at that. I gifted her with the way the light chipped through the leaves.
The bear came. He was warm and smelled earthy. I buried my fingers in his fur, pressed my heart up against him. I worked down from his ears, combing his fur with my fingers, picking out the twigs and leaves, seeking out the heat of him. I climbed on his back to reach his shoulders and he got up and started walking up the hill. The steep places are easier for him than they are for me. He never lost his footing. At the cave I got down but pressed my shoulder back against his chest, reluctant to move on without him, reluctant to pass into the day without him.
He assured me that I am never without him, much less here now. I gifted him with a necklace of sea shells. They rattled when he moved like small clackety bells. He licked my arms, my face, my heart. There was a weight on my heart which he lifted and settled in to gnaw on, urging me to go on while he took care of it. I slipped through the bright fissure into a softness of green. No road today, just small flashes of sun, the wind in the leaves, the tender green along the ground.
I sat right down. There was no need to go anywhere. The woods were full of creatures. Fox was there but did not approach. This was not a fox day. Deer man was there and we practiced presence. There was a spring at the other side of the small clearing. Butterflies lit and fell. I lined the edge of the spring with small golden bowls. A gift of honoring and receiving.
The butterflies lit on my arms and lifted. I bloomed into a bed of white flowers. This is all that needs to be done, to be the secret bed of flowers in the clearing in the wood. The sweet small scent lifted through the canopy and into the blue.
OOO
Telling is brushing her long black hair. She is supple and smiling. I give her the golden bowl to drink from. She has forgiven me my long neglect. My heart pours out, rippling and dark as her hair. We have the bond of lake water between us, that dark drift, that winded lilt, that full sky equanimity.
We move together; my arm lifts, her arm lifts with me, close, like an echo, a drop shadow, lending depth and resonance to every move. And to stillness too. We are bound together. We make sense together. We are each the answer to the other’s question. Sisters. We are sisters.
We go together to see the grandmother. We take a bouquet of flowers and a feather, a small bouquet because flowers are scarce in this dry season. Indian paint brush, golden rod, a sprig of sage, a long grey goose feather. I let Telling present them because it was her knowing that gathered them. We sit together on the ground at the grandmother’s feet.
The grandmother laughs and claps her hands. “You three sisters,” she says. Three sisters. June Bug has joined us, her head in Telling’s lap, eyes to the sky. “You three dancing sisters.” The words are a sort of invocation, they lift us up and we dance. We dance in a circle around the grandmother. We dance as if there were no other purpose at all, but to dance. In a larger circle around us other people are dancing. Our dancing feeds their dancing. Their dancing feeds ours. Arms like ribbons, like lake weed blooming. We laugh and we dance.
OOO
I am beached on my own shore, unmoving. There is weed in my hair and a certain sogginess about my fingertips. Pebbled. I lie still in the comfort of the dark.
The shush of the river soothes me; sweet, wordless caress.
Behind me, the Ferryman tends a small fire and has set my clothes to dry. I am wrapped in a blanket of enough. Thick and soft, enveloping. Enough.
OOO
dream stories 