With startling synchronicity I found myself facilitating a dreaming circle while simultaneously participating in one. (I suppose when I saw the title “Earth Dreaming” I could’ve anticipated it, but I read that more figuratively so it came as a surprise.)
In this circle we are inviting the Earth to communicate through our dreams. And the night of that first meeting my dreams shifted immediately in unexpected ways.
For one, my dreams were mainly taking place indoors. There were tense and irritable in mood. I felt a quality of being unable to escape a cycle, I was lucid but less than usual, unable to exercise agency.
Several nights in a row I dreamt of living in strange apartments with many interconnected rooms. There were conflicts of dividing space among roommates, leases being rewritten, walls painted and stripped.
I woke up with the feeling of being cleaved apart, divided and mined, weary and unable to stand up fully.
Perhaps this is that feeling they call Ecogrief, and it was a visceral aching that I’ve carried in the weeks since.
Something I haven’t shared much about is that last summer Prospect Park seemed sick to me. I felt a dullness to places that were verdant the year before. There was a stunning amount of garbage, everywhere, but especially in the lake. I kept arriving at the sight of dead animals on my walks. I found two raccoons, one boated and floating in the water, and another at the bottom of a tree. I also found baby raccoon that had fallen to the ground, I knew it was best to allow its mother to hopefully collect them in a quiet moment but I was pained to leave it.
And on the same walk, a baby robin, its wings stretched and head turned in profile in a macabre tableau. There were more examples but you get my point.
I felt deeply rattled, wondering what the fuck is happening??
It’s one thing to accept that death is a part of life, and it’s another to sit with death that is preventable. Death that is unjust and tragic, death that stems from consumption, pollution, extraction of earth and people, the elevation of some lives over others, is a persistent grief that has no closure.
I often look to the Earth to remember how to dream, how to see possibility in the wreckage, and these dreams did not comfort me. But they did awaken something.
Many would say that the body is an extension of the earth, or vice versa. We are of the earth, and our relationship to the earth is not neutral. If the earth is also a mother, then we could presume that our relationship to our human mothers may also shape what we expect from and owe to the earth.
Or this is what I began to contemplate as I also dreamt of pregnancies, miscarriages, mothers and daughters, and the closing of family lines.
In meditations I would find myself sinking into the bottom of a lake— the benthic zone (bacterial ecosystem), or the hypolimnion (the coldest and deepest part of the water), I later learned.
This zone is the digestive system of the lake, where waste is broken down and a complex system of crustaceans, bacteria, and invertebrates live. It is a crucial part of the lake ecosystem, contributing heavily to its health or deterioration. This is the death part I eluded to in my invitation to this piece.
Decomposition is the completion of death to some, and a birth to others. Many of us have an aversion to this sort of thing. The smells, the squishy-sliminess, the muted browns of it make us want to contribute with our own contents.
This part needs tending too.
I’m speaking metaphorically, but the ecosystem of a lake reminds us that it’s also literal.
The pelvic region of the energy body is considered one of the “sacred portals.” It is one of the places we might rest our awareness after the practices of preparation that lead us towards the state of Yoga Nidra, a potential space to encounter Turiya, bliss. But until that evening I had not experienced it so concretely.
As I lay with my hands on my belly, feeling the sensations of the gut and womb, the darkness behind my eyes gave way to a view of my body from above. And on my lower abdomen I saw an eye, or maybe it was a mouth. What I know for sure is that it could open and close, and in its open state, a vast and inky space revealed itself.
As I descended through this opening I was again at the bottom of a lake. But this lake soon floated like an effigy in the blank air, and as it deepened to a rich, red color I understood it was a placenta. It had a luminous purple cord that dropped down to the ground in a straight line.
Like a bathtub draining, it withdrew into itself with the word Afterbirth.
The metaphorical themes of “death, life, death” (as popularized by Clarissa Pinkcola Estés) are not new, and perhaps they are quite popular in some circles. But I don’t believe I have heard much attention paid to the metaphorical afterbirth.
That is, the extension of you that was created to nurture a new thing to life.Perhaps we forget that this sometimes this needs to be broken down and released, because this vital element served its purpose and soon it will no longer be alive.
Unsurprisingly given my own childless life, I know a number of people who chose not to be parents. And lately we’ve been sharing together what has been birthed and completed in this potential space. Some of us also have an anatomy capable of creating literal new life, and some of us have chosen to take the role of completing a lineage that dies with us. And I began to wonder if perhaps we were functioning as midwives to an intergenerational afterbirth.
(Yes I’m working on a much longer piece about this— I’ll be taking some time to let it unfold)
Meanwhile, I’d like to offer you the following prompts for reflection:
What have you generated, or birthed, recently?
What was that quality, skill, space that you created to nurture and grow this new “life?”
What is the afterbirth of your idea/project/life change/relationship/or other new life?
How can this be repurposed, what can be salvaged?
Who or what helps you to complete this process, the midwife to your transition?
How might you acknowledge or ritualize this right of passage?
Inward Vision 