Yes and no
Strength, karma, a baby, a bear, and a boy
It looked like a large black dog, a hound from somewhere else. It couldn’t be from these woods, could it? Even humped over in the middle of the trail, even licking its paws, even curled in on itself, it was still larger than I was, or the stroller that the baby sat in, babbling “ma-ma-ma-ma, da-da-da-da-da!” It was still larger than baby and stroller and the large, furry unintelligibility of the baby’s language and my body, all together, combined.
Oh my god, I thought, you’re beautiful. The bear was so close to Lyra and me. I had been running on the soft limestone next to the Piney River, pushing the stroller straight enough on the path, but turning my head this way and that to see what I could see in the too-early morning: deer by the river crossing where we play, sunlight swinging down into the forest with the grapevines, baby frogs hopping around the edges of the goldenrod, too cool and early yet for the mosquitoes that still bother us a bit this time of year. What I’m saying is that I wasn’t really paying attention to the path ahead of me so I got pretty close to the bear before I realized it was there. Maybe the distance from my front porch to the mailbox, all told, which is so close, which is too close. And then we were stopped there, staring at the black bear and it was staring at us. Lyra didn’t have the sense to be quiet, or I didn’t have the sense to be loud, who knows.
I don’t actually think I thought “oh my god, you’re beautiful.” I don’t think I thought at all. My body just had this brief, instinctive movement towards the wild thing, the huge thing, as if it were drawing me in. I noticed the gloss on its coat, the tiny twitch of its ears, the heaving tummy, the tongue. But to say I noticed the parts is to do an injustice to the magnetism of the whole. This thing was breathing! Mobile! Being! There was a black bear in the woods mere jogging steps away from me and my baby. Ludicrously, I had thought the woods were my woods, the baby’s woods. Ludicrously, when I thought of the woods as the woods of the Goddess, I meant I felt the woods were a gift to me from the Goddess. But here was the bear. The bear was more here than I was! Beautiful, although the word wasn’t actually there and couldn’t possibly describe what I mean. Did I mean terror? I felt terror in the moment after the beauty, flushing and filling out the current of awe, close on its heels.
The bear was looking at us! The bear was like our mailbox, something we could easily cross over to and open. The bear was not our mailbox, and it was big (did I mention that?) and it could, if it wanted, more speedily cross over to us, and those paws, those claws, newly licked, seemed like they could do a lot more than opening. Oh my God. Actually, I did say that out loud: “Oh my fucking God.” I jerked the stroller back, and moved to stand in front of it. Lyra was still talking to herself, happily insisting on the presence of “mama” and “dada.” Did she see the bear? If she did, I couldn’t tell. I had my phone in my hand as I stood in front of her, and it was easy enough to get my thumb on the screen to call Kiernan. But he was 45 minutes away, probably busy taking the morning roll call of middle schoolers in his seventh-grade advisory. He couldn’t help me with a bear on the Piney.
I thought of my sister, that time she had been trapped by a moose on a trail with her new puppy, when she lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. They often hiked with bear spray out there. So did my mother-in-law’s family, on the Blackfeet Reservation, or when they were in the park, in Glacier, Montana. Her great grandmother was called Sinopah, “Kit Fox,” and my mother-in-law’s Indian name is Two Bear Woman, after the family story about the two grizzly bears Sinopah’s father considered to be his own. But I wasn’t Two Bear Woman! This wasn’t Montana! This was a little rail-to-trail park in Nelson County, Virginia, next to some mountains that were too tired to be called mountains, really, more like rocks that were loosening themselves in preparation to become riverbed. This was a Wednesday morning, just after 8 am! There were other cars parked at the trailhead! There was the stroller with a hot bottle in the gear compartment. My mind touched on these realities as if they could domesticate the animal in front of me, the animal thumping in my ribcage, too.
The bear ran off. I watched it go through the trees, and then I ran off, too, back towards the parking lot, phone clutched in my hands as they balanced against the stroller handle, fingers typing out amazed, frantic, misspelled texts to my husband and friends. I was already falling away from the encounter. I was already losing what it could have possibly meant in my attempts to say “this happened,” in my gestures toward defining what it was that happened and how it felt. What had happened, actually? I found myself calibrating my description, trying to keep some secret part of it just for the baby and me, even as I wanted to hold it in place by telling a story, by creating an image of myself and the baby and the bear together in the woods in the minds of people who loved me. Why? I didn’t want it to be a funny story. I didn’t want the injustice of melodrama. I didn’t want shock and awe. I didn’t want my mom to text me “omg, I am sending you bear spray,” lol. Better was the image my friend sent me of her tarot drawing that morning, the Strength card from the Pagan Otherworlds Tarot deck, which, instead of the standard image of the woman with the lion from the Waite-Smith or Thoth or similar inspired decks, shows a woman touching the head of a large black bear.
I’m not sure I’ll ever draw Strength again without thinking of the bear on the Piney. Usually when I draw this card myself, I am looking for life in its red and golden hues: hot blood, calm presence, the ability to endure in a certain limelight and, in doing so, to create the possibility of teaching endurance and visibility to others. Bears, for me, are more evocative of Saturn, not usually an archetype I link with leonine Strength. And yet the bear has lived with me in the week since the encounter. It’s been a week in which I’ve needed a particular kind of strength: the ability to endure routine, the seeming smallness of my life, the incessant care of and for my children, and myself, while my heart slams against my chest in its craving for rest, on the one hand, and, on the other, in its craving to be met in intellectual adventure that conversations with a nine-month-old and her five-year-old brother just don’t quite fulfill. Maybe I told the story of the bear because I needed to gesture toward yet another moment of “coming to,” however furry or unintelligible or melodramatic my language. I had been missing my own life in the living of it. Sometimes I get so focused on negotiating a good, true, and real way through the hell that presents itself as cultural commentary or, truly, as culture itself these days that I slide into the long, particular hours of the steadily nondescript. Formless realms from meditation come home to roost on the wrong plane. This is another kind of hell, another version of death, in spite of the care work I’m doing, in spite of the natural surrounds. And then, one morning, there was the bear. Life pinned me down, demanding presence.
And soon after, there was this from my son, on a different walk: “Mom, do you know what karma is?” Theo and I have been talking about karma around mealtimes recently, as a reminder for both of us to try to gently untangle the strange and chthonic feelings that he has (that I once had) about food, nourishment, and growth. I’ve been open with him that I don’t fully understand karma, that I’m still learning about it, testing it out, trying it out intellectually, in prayer, in meditation, in my body, too, to see whether it helps, whether it can suffice as an explanation for suffering or luck that seems not to originate with me yet still somehow seems stuck to me. What does it mean if karma suffices? How is karma different from sin? Or from epigenetics? The principle of Saturn? I'm not sure yet. Theo is the kind of kid that wants to know what you don’t know, because that gives him an opening to think deeply about things himself. “What is karma, Theo?” I asked him. We were walking at sunset, on Lonesome Pine Road, miles from the Piney River but of a kind with its land. The sun was at our backs, and we could see our shadows looming out ahead of us on the gravel. He pointed to the moving appearances of ourselves. Oblong, silly, mutable, enduring. “Good karma is when you see your shadow on a sunny day, and you know you’re beautiful, and you know everything is beautiful,” he said. “Bad karma is when you you see your shadow on sunny day, and you feel like your whole body is a shadow.”
As a mother, this statement struck me in many ways. I have of course read it for clues into Theo’s experience of karma, into his psychology and what he can’t quite articulate yet, into how it feels for him to be a body, to be a boy, to be a child, to grow up in our beautiful, ugly, often ungentle, often awesome world. But Theo’s words struck me also as, somehow, being of a kind with the bear: Hound from somewhere else, a wild truth that draws me in, a sublime beauty alongside a rush of fear. At its most simple, Strength is about saying “yes” or “no.” Yes, I saw a bear. No, nothing happened. That’s the whole of it, and only just the opening to something else, besides.
The Full Moon Eclipse in Pisces occurs on Sunday, September 7. I’ll be offering one-card tarot readings for those of you who’d like a guide through this lunation. Comment below with your rising sign and your question. I’ll be answering these tomorrow and Friday afternoons! Meanwhile, I’m using this eclipse season to pull together lecture materials for my upcoming workshop on dreams. Details about the classes and links to register are below!
What:
When does a dream, to borrow a phrase from Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet, “articulate beyond its own self-indulgence?” Can it? How? When? By what measure?
Freud said dreams were the fulfillment of wishes. Jung often wrote about dreams as the landscape of the collective unconscious. James Hillman said dreams offer us a map of the underworld,* while Johanna Hedva has called dreams the place where their writing sometimes begins. Gary Lachman spent years detailing the dream’s role in precognition and prophecy. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche teaches dream yoga to students of the Bön lineage, a tradition where dreams offer guidance for wellbeing and awakening. And in ancient Greece and Rome, the sick and injured were taken to the pavilions upon which the modern hospital is founded. They received what we’d perhaps recognize as the standard medical and psychological care of the day in these temples of Asclepius. But the most important treatment involved dreams: while there, patients were encouraged to sleep and dream deeply as they were attended by the priestesses of Asclepius, guides who later helped them with the interpretation of dream symbols that could uplift, or helped them understand dream encounters with the divine that could heal.
My own journey with dreaming has taken me through all of these realms. Wish and archetypal encounter. Hell and creativity. Prophecy and healing.** I’m a sensitive person who was plagued by lifelong vivid nightmares that got worse in the wake of my career as a reporter on the daily crime beat. In the years after that job and out of desperation to rid myself of haunting imagery every night, I began recording my dreams each morning throughout the 2010s. The dream journaling set the stage for a morning ritual that has been the foundation of each day of my life for nearly a decade, a foundation that is one part dream log, one part divination, one part writing practice, and much, much more besides. More than 30 dream journals, hundreds of dreams, too many tarot draws to mention, and countless hours of indulging in dream studies later, my nightly hauntings have ceased to be terrors that I have to “deal with,” or, worse yet, ignore. Instead, my dream life is a wellspring of generativity, creativity, encounters with strange and important others, and, yes, even, sometimes, wisdom and healing.
It’s September, which means eclipse season is upon us. Let’s accept the astrological portal of the eclipses as invitation to dive into the shadowy, impossible world of dreams. We’ll look at dreams through the lenses of the thinkers, writers, and spiritual teachers above, and through the archetypal significance of what I like to call the “dream guides” in astrology and the tarot. Then, we’ll dive into instructions for creating your own dream practice and asking it questions that articulate life beyond mere self-indulgence—questions about wellbeing, creative expression, the development of intuition and awareness, spiritual awakening, or whatever guise your wish for deeper understanding wears.
This is a two-day workshop, spread across two weekends, with lecture-based, interactive, and practical components, drawing on my backgrounds as a PhD in English with concentrations in Creative Writing and Women’s and Gender Studies, a practicing tarot reader and astrologer, and a teacher of writing as a way of healing to cancer patients and caregivers of cancer patients at UVA hospital. I’ll also be drawing on insights from my own dreaming, dream practice, and dreamwork with clients. There’s an opportunity to book a post-workshop one-on-one session with me to look at your dreams in conjunction with your natal chart and the tarot.
*Is a “map of the underworld” the same terrain as “the collective unconscious?” Join us to discuss!
**What do I mean by “healing?” Lots of things, but most importantly: a pervasive sense of being able to see, carry, and experience joy, no matter how difficult or terrible my life, or my health, or the world seems to be.
Where:
Zoom. The link will be emailed out to participants one week before and on the morning of each workshop.
When:
Saturday, October 4 12:30-2:30 p.m. ET Introductory lecture: Dreams, the Mind, and the Underworld (will be recorded and sent to participants.)
Saturday, October 18 12:30-2:30 p.m. ET Dreamwork and the Dragon: Astrology/tarot lecture, participant examples, and demos as we explore personal dreams and the esoteric practices that offer perspective in these realms (will be recorded and sent to participants.)
The two-week break between sessions will come with instructions for nightly and morning dreamwork that we will discuss together in the second workshop.
Opportunity to book one-on-one post-workshop readings.
Class size and registration window:
The workshop is capped at 12 participants for intimacy and depth of conversation. Registration is open now through Friday, October 3, or when the course is filled. Thank you for your understanding!
Cost:
Register here for the Dream Level: $200 for both workshops
Register here for the Portal Level: $260 for both workshops plus one-on-one individual post-workshop session with me
Sample of texts we’ll be drawing on for the course:
Dreams: A Portal to the Source by Edmond Whitmont and Sylvia Perera
The Sovereignty of Quiet by Kevin Quashie
The Dreambody by Arnold Mindel
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
On Dreams and Death by Marie Louise von Franz
Dreams by CG Jung (from Volumes 4, 6, 8, and 12 of the Collected Works)
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain by Johanna Hedva
The Dream and the Underworld by James Hillman
The Tibetan Yogas of Dreams and Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
The Snake in the Clinic by Guy Dargert
The Rod and the Serpent of Asklepios by J. Schouten
Dreaming Ahead of Time by Gary Lachman
My own dream journals and practice. (If you’d like to read essays or posts I’ve written around dreams, here are just a few from the archive to get you started:
Hello there, been thinking a lot about your bear and all of our shadows. For me, the bear has always represented both the fiercest and softest protection of a loving parent. And a dream my husband once shared with me when he was going through an acrimonious custody battle in which a huge bear climbed into his sleeping bag with him and held him tight. If you still have the time or inclination for pre-eclipse pulls, I am a Scorpio rising andm, to be brief, am facing some questions and confusions on how to be really heard and/or seen by those I care deeply about. The ways I try are not coming through. Sending love and gratitude for your writing and sharing. What a joy to read.
Hello, rising Sag here. Your words (and those reflections from Theo) felt gorgeously resonant this morning. I suppose my question for this lunation is how do I stay connected to some kind of stable core, even when it feels like everything is falling apart? Is a stable core actually a thing? Is that the wrong question? I’m four months out of chemo, as we have talked about, and doing pretty well barring some watch-and-wait issues. But my mom, who I helped through her illness in 2020, is facing a recurrance. I want to be strong for her, for me, but I also know that falling apart is a natural response. So I guess what I am really asking is how to hold the tension between those things.