There are
always gifts in our wounds, if we are able to claim them.
The
shaman don’t say, “You’re a mess. I will
fix you and make you what you were before,” but rather, “You’re a mess, a
palette full of odd, chaotic blobs of color lost from their containers; let us
discover the right way to combine those colors into art, rather than trying to
push them back into their tidy tubes".
A
dream is a journey; it is also a place.
You went somewhere in your dream, near or far from the fields you know
in your regular life. Because you have
been to the place, you can find your way here again.
Humans
are forgetful animals. We forget that we
have a story beyond our current circumstances, that we may have come into this
world with an assignment and an identity that predate our present lives and
won’t end when our present bodies are left behind.
We may not want to think about our ancestors, but our ancestors are
thinking about us.
It’s
not just about keeping soul in the body and remembering that we are star-born,
and that our stories are played out – and are playing now—in more than one
time. It’s about growing soul, becoming
more than we ever were before, embodying more of the greater, or higher
self. It requires the willingness to
take the creator’s leap and bring something new into our lives and our
worlds. And we lose soul when we make
the choice to give up on our big dreams, when we refuse to make the creative
leap of faith or to trust ourselves to love.
When we wimp out on the larger life, a part of our soul may withdraw its
energy and magic because it is disgusted with us. The Iroquois Indians say that if we fail to
honor “the wishes of the soul” (as opposed to ego agendas), the soul will
distance itself from us, leaving us prone to sickness and bad luck, putting us
on the road of the walking dead.
