Receptivity

I had a dream about how women can help life. I struggled with this dream, because on a deep level I could feel it, but my mind couldn’t understand it. It was too much of a stretch for my mind.

In the dream I was told that women can plant something, like seeds, ‘in the beginning and in the end’, something vibrational in the earth. But that this knowledge is hidden underneath the clothing of conditioning. I was then shown an image: a pioneer woman wearing long skirts and bonnet, a woman who worked so hard just to survive.

So I held it, and prayed, and waited.

Are the beginning and the end the same moment? Here we are at the end of an era, of a fragmentation of systems that haven’t valued the feminine and that cut us off from the sacred in life. And what are these new seeds?

One day, overwhelmed by all the recent changes in my own personal life, I went walking up in the hills. Holding this dream, these questions, I walked while feeling the pain of not being able to make conscious what was hidden inside.

I felt a kind of deep agitation, holding, not knowing. Reaching the top of the hill, I looked out over the city. Such a dry, empty state of unknowing. With sadness, I resigned myself to the fact that I was not able to penetrate the wall of my own conditioning.

I turned around and started walking down the hill. The wind stirred the lace-like usnea that hung from the limbs of the oaks. I was alone, and stopped to listen to the wind, to the sound of a woodpecker and the rustle of leaves. Looking up through the trees at a vivid blue sky, I suddenly became aware of an aliveness, something akin to joy. So intensely alive and dynamic. A door had opened; life opened as I stood there, filling me with this sense of aliveness. And I stayed there until it was time to return home.

I had been looking for some other type of knowledge. But at that moment I knew this is knowledge.

One night a few weeks later, I felt again an anxiety, or agitation, or worry, all the things that cut one off from life. But I knew there was another way to be. In prayer, mustering up this other way, I stood up inside myself, as receptive as I was that Saturday morning when standing among the trees.

And then, in the early hours of the morning, there came a peace; a sweetness was present. Like the aliveness I had felt in the hills, only quieter. I wondered, is this how we can welcome something here? I thought about the sense of welcoming. Like welcoming a person into one’s home. Or a quality into one’s heart.

Is this holding, this receptivity, a way of how women can plant the sacred in life, “in the beginning and in the end?”