by Christa Lancaster
I've been dreaming about girls since August. I needed someone who could recognize and like that girl to have the girl in me surface. But I'm not surfacing. I'm descending. She surfaces as I descend. Marc, my love, is there meeting me as I meet her. He knows her. She sees it is safe to surface, to let herself be seen and known. She can emerge for the first time into the broad daylight of my life. She is who I really am. The girl is the deepest aspect of my soul. She can reincarnate now for the first time. What will this mean? Who will I be?
I am finding out.
She is wild. She is an artist girl. She runs with large twin standard poodles. She paints. Her eyes open up to a continuous tunnel of timeless time. A continuum of knowledge and clarity. She says what she knows. She does not hesitate. She runs with the wind to the edge of the cliff. She is fearless and strong and brave. She just is. What a girl.
I worry in the night that I've forgotten how to write. I've changed. I've grown. When I last wrote I was surfing the dangerous waters of the undertow, blown about by the winds of terror, being dragged under into treacherous dark caverns. I wrote about angst and longing and movement. I wrote about the past and my childhood. I wrote through the dark nights, the alchemical shifts, being stuck and coming unstuck. I wrote my way through issues of sex and trauma to find my way to union.
When I finished writing the book, Vessel, I had a dream in which Sue and I are wandering around Providence, Rhode Island ( a place I've lived twice in my life, which represents for me, learning how to make art and how to live as an artist). In the dream all the warehouses and old boatyards have big doors that are open wide. We venture into an enormous space in which sculptors are making huge wooden ship-like structures. I feel excited, turned on, inspired. I want to make art too. The whole city is thrown open. The city vibrates with creative energy.
Then, I gave my book to my father, naively, innocently. His reaction was like a slow bomb going off. He did not want to speak to me for a year and a half. I was forced into letting go of my projection onto my father.
I had a dream in June, the next month, of a girl and a father. I drew a little picture of the girl and her father, their heads leaning towards each other. I stuck it to the Italian tiles above my sink. On Sunday night while I made dinner and Rebecca set the table, she asked me who the father was. I replied, ‘It was the father who can love his daughter, the spiritual embodiment of a father.’
It is not my father. No father can be that. He was simply the father he could be, no more or less. Just human.’ I told her that the father was in my dream.
November 12th, 2009
When one or more is nourished
I dream Bill and I are in a large classroom of students, all seated and waiting for instructions. I stand up and say, to Bill: " We are not moving ahead until everyone is nourished."
Bill nods, (as Bill does!) in agreement. The scene shifts and we are all in the ocean and bread is falling from the sky and we are all eating chunks as we tread water. Yes, the bread is like manna, I think to myself.
(Marc comes in the house with the dogs, speaking to a client on the phone. He woke up at 6am and left with them to walk up to the tower in the Park. I stayed sleeping till 8am. Yesterday I worked up at our family's house in Stowe, preparing it to be rented to a family from Massachussetts for the ski season. While I removed family photographs from shelves and boxed fragile objects Marc worked with clients in the red room. I felt grateful he was there, doing what he does. He is coming into another part of my world: property, houses, material reality. Our worlds come closer in the witnessing of my tasks. Our relationship knits tighter. We celebrate by eating Japanese food, miso and sushi and noodles.)
What does it mean for everyone to be nourished? What is nourishment?
I am being nourished in a relationship with a man.
In the nourishment of daily life, it's tender human moments of contact and collision, the girl, buried deep inside me, rises up, like a lotos blossom in a shady, dark fish pond, to open, petal by petal, daily, more and more.
The relationship is the ground in the world where my inner and outer lives converge.
Two souls who know the state of essence, overlapping like a Venn diagram, producing a field of even stronger essence.
Essence plus essence produces an expanded field of consciousness.
This is what I am seeing is nourishment.
This is where my dreams have been leading me.
This is what I want to write about: the life of nourishment beyond the craggy coral reefs of trauma.
I want to write about what else is possible when you find your way out beyond the protective barrier of trauma, out past the shallow waters, the safe shores, the roiling undertow of ocean colliding with matter. What lies beyond form and matter is the deep blue ocean, where deep enough, there is no sound, no movement, no interference from the surface drama of wind and land, of colliding human forces.
I want to write about the moments of collision in human relationship when the ancient wound is touched and the habitual flash of anger or fear breaks the field of essence, tears at the fabric of fragile human relationship. The force of opposition that runs freely in the world, the pathology, wants instantly to insert itself into the vacuum of consciousness created in the moment we depart from the present felt reality of hurt from the past.
We leave, or lose awareness, forget that we can live in the depths, underneath the glaring surface drama. We come up for air, seek safe ground on familiar territory, grasp for logical answers, someone to blame or judge. Scratching around desperately we look for validation for our hurt in the desert of the air world. It answers us only with cries of equal despair. It wants only to commiserate and complain. The dark force revels.
When I leave the water world I shatter the world of essence, the deep place in which I know I am loved and known. I leave it in a split second of reaction. If my love, my partner, betrays himself too, and comes with me, up into the air, we are both lost to ourselves. The salt air corrodes the tenderness and love between us. The dark force wants to destroy the tendrils of trust growing between us, to break the field of essence.
What if we hold the space in the depths for our love instead of rushing up into the air to join them?
What if one of us stays in the under water world even if the other leaves?
****
I am the girl running through long grass with two bounding standard poodles.
I am the girl at home on her bed on bustling Broadway.
I am the wild girl who is free from the basement.
I am the girl in the white, scoop-necked long dress with layers of petalled silk, waiting for the old black Bermudian taxi driver to come and take her to the occasion.
I am free to be myself, the girl, who can speak and laugh and tell the truth.
I am the girl who is the teacher.
I am the teacher who is the girl.
I am the girl facing into the demon contorted with hatred and venom.
I am the girl not scared of facing into his lie.
I am the girl who is not scared to take a stand and be honest And pay the price.
I am the girl who goes all the way through and who wants God, love, enlightenment and fulfillment on this go round, not next.
I am the girl who holds the vision.
I am the mystic visionary poet who moves through the linear, rational, material world holding onto her wisdom.
I am the visionary girl who sees and speaks.
And is no longer silenced.
I am the one who speaks truth.
I am who I am.
She is me.