Healing Dream

Healing Dream Three days before my mother died, the family on deathwatch, I had a dream, remembered a song I received on a mountain trail. It guided me to find the dark tower defending the foothills where the skirmishes happened, to ascend a spiral stair where a beacon once burned, where a sacred fire was allowed to die, I stir up the ashes to find a living spark. Throw open the door of my heart, to face my truth, where I am, and fall into dream. This is your task, the song continues, to go through these agonized meetings with the crouching cougar of your mind on the ladder of the angels to God, to climb past mistakes and relationships where you hadn’t learned to hold the reins on words, actions, feelings. Now I am able to honor the elders, departing and departed. The mountain song carries me to take a step beyond my small self to a fullness of heart where earthly losses are dissolved. I step out in dream world, I am astral travelling across treetops, a forest dark where campfires of the ancestors are burning; I fly to the far side of the river of pain that flows through the painting that hung in mother’s dining room. I am inside it now; like a bird, I swoop, and dip above tumbling water, gliding down to ocean’s edge where forest turns to savannah, and green hills bend to the will of waves that give shape to the water’s edge. My soul sings a song of power as it descends from the high hill to the shoreline of a broad sea dotted with white sails, boats on brave journeys, a glimpsed promise, a horizon in the mist.