June 1, 2022. I am teaching a weeklong Writing Intensive online. The Intensive is taking place during this time of extreme chaos. Writers are responsible for meeting the times; that is why we are gathering. We open by honoring and grieving the 19 children and two teachers who were massacred in Uvalde, some of whom were buried yesterday and today. A participant weeps for her teenage son whose schoolmate committed suicide very publicly a few weeks ago. (During our day of silence, she learns another 16-year-old schoolmate of her son has been arrested for trying to enlist fellow students to engage in a mass shooting and bombing for which he has been gathering arms and ammunition.) Then we speak of the ongoing brutal war in Ukraine. 243 children have been killed so far in the war, 446 have been wounded and 139 are missing. A member of our community has just arrived in Holland to negotiate travel visa details after rescuing her grandmother from a Ukrainian border town several hours from Bucharest. Two members of our small group of twenty have become ill, one with a virulent flu, another with Covid, while for another Covid has just erupted in her household.
We understand, we are not separate from what is occurring everywhere in the globe. There is no privilege protecting anyone from these times. Everything is connected to everything else. Or as Thich Nhat Hahn said it, “This is because that is.”
To do our work well, we continue to scan the globe to see what is in the field. A huge vitriolic mob of Israeli right wingers illegally overwhelmed Temple Mount/Al-Haram al-Sharif, celebrating Jerusalem Day, the annexation of East Jerusalem after the 6 Day War, and the murder by Israeli forces of the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, chanting “Death to Arabs,” and “May your village burn.” The Governor of Oklahoma signed a new law banning abortion from the moment of fertilization, with few exceptions. The Taliban issued a decree requiring all women of Afghanistan to cover their faces and wear a full burqa or hijab or suffer criminal punishment. South Sudan is reeling from drought and flooding and Californians must cut their water use 35% as the rivers and lakes are drying up. Temperatures are soaring, hurricane season has begun with a vengeance, and New Mexico is still burning. The assault on the animals is perpetual and grim. Everything is endangered and precarious. This is our Earth, our globe, our world, our home, now.
The invitation to the Intensive reads this way: Writing provides a lens and a focus to help us face the most difficult times. This year it has become clear that the forms and directions of the Literature of Restoration deepens our work and serves our souls as well as our communities. It has proven itself essential in guiding us with its emphasis on beauty, wisdom, the voices of the natural world and the vocabulary of dreams and by opening to the real presence of the spirits and ancestors. Even as it is our task to reimagine a future for ourselves, each other, and all beings, it is the writer’s responsibility to understand the times and carry the values, implicitly, in the writing that can meet them.
Several dreams have come to me during this time, and I am especially curious about the coincidence of two of them. I have been including dreams in almost every curriculum for the last 45 years so that we might receive such wisdom as has come to Indigenous peoples globally for tens of thousands of years. During such dire times of our own making, it is reassuring to be attuned to any input or guidance that can help reverse our current ways of life, restoring sanity and the natural world. This Intensive is based upon the Literature of Restoration and so, naturally, we are all attending dreams, and, accordingly, am I.
In one dream, I am in an exceedingly large, formal living room which can accommodate many people in separate conversation groups on large white linen couches and similar easy chairs. A white plaster half-wall, such as one might find surrounding a villa in Mexico or Greece is providing privacy. Five or six feet high, half the height of the ceiling, it slides along rails to divide the room as the guests might desire. This is demonstrated several times, as an invisible guide describes how the room may be used. While the elegant, upholstered furniture is exceedingly comfortable, the arm rests thick and rounded, the pillows equally inviting, not dissimilar in shape from the wall divider, the room has a corporate quality. I understand, this is not a living room, it is a lobby, and we are guests visiting or accompanying a patient in a treatment center. The room is designed to project comfort, ease and confidence, whether these feelings are or are not appropriate to the situation. At first, I thought we were in a private home, but now I understand we are in an institution. Whatever services will be received, will be very expensive.
In the second dream, I am on a very wide beach with nothing but beach visible. Free standing is a frayed board, perhaps 9’ by 11’, its layers showing irregularly at the edges. I am invited to follow a small group of Australian Aboriginal people as they open this ‘door’ that leads to the other world. I can’t follow them entirely, but I don’t know if this is a prohibition, or if I am simply unable. Undaunted, they open the door, go into the emptiness behind it, and then out. They seem oblivious to my presence while openly demonstrating how this is done. In another instance, I am shown the way to open the free-standing door to enter the empty space behind it. Another old, weathered board is standing about six feet ahead of us, which, I am informed, will open back into this world.
Two walls. One wall divides a lobby in an institutional healing center, more corporate than intimate, and the other wall is actually a door leading from this world to the other world. One refers to the standard western treatment required to treat western illnesses, another refers to vision.
Perhaps, as dreams are often tricksters, there is a play here designed to focus our attention. Australian Aboriginal philosophy was given the name “Dreaming” by Western scholars at the end of the 19th Century. It evokes the stories and legends that describe Aboriginal cosmology, the creation of the world by the ancestors whose presence is still evident and in which everything is related to everything else. Curious that a dream occurring in the midst of a writing intensive exploring ways of writing that might bring healing to the world invokes the Dreaming wisdom which could well aid us if we could understand and honor such a profound understanding of the real nature of the world.
There is nothing more to say. For myself, I have spent the last years trying to leave Western mind and its literary values because it leads, as is tragically clear, to the horrific circumstances of contemporary life. The Literature of Restoration is one path. This literature honors dreams, Indigenous wisdom, the natural world and the spiritual life. And here we are in an Intensive and such a dream comes, in stark contrast to an earlier dream image communicating the formulas which characterize Western culture. I do not doubt which dream I will follow. But, it will take deep listening and much contemplation to become able to open the old door to the Indigenous world of vision.
Dreams
Congratulations Deena, sending you love and respect, Constance Buck
My heart feels your words deeply. I'm grateful for them. I send you love and support, as a fellow earth dweller, visionary, poet, healer. Deep respect for restorative writing and dreamtime. x