So I was discussing with a client a very significant time in his life when some very surreal shit went down. Those kind of freaky experiences that are metaphysical in nature, that Jung refers to as the synchronicity. The meaningful coincidence. Synchronicities speak an emotional spiritual language to us through which we are guided by some kind of, you guessed it, guiding force. The Universe, or Higher Love, or Higher Mind gets our attention through signs and symbols laid in our path to grab our attention, like heralding angels or those people at airports holding up a cardboard sign with our name on it. Most of us have had these kind of profound experiences, that oh, sure, we can call crazy or superstitious or new age, but well they aren’t by virtue of the fact that they are universal although experienced in a deeply personal way. Those moments we look up with you can’t make this shit up astonishment at the shit that has gone down.
Well this kind of thing started young for me, and as I learned to leaninto it, the language of the synchronicity expanded and then as I created a career of helping others it grew to include them. When I truly connect with it there are weeks that will feel so lit up by this kind of experience that life seems choreographed by a great maternal force in the sky, loving me into place with fireflies and wonder. Magical, yes. I have always considered “magic” to be the absence of constraint; a kind of levity of being rather than a hocus pocus. Not saying I don’t enjoy the hocus pocus, or the ceremony of things mystical. But back to you; my playing cards, scattered in remote and unlikely places, calling out their messages became your playing cards, scattered in remote places, calling out their messages. You dreamt of white feathers and one drifted toward me from the heavens whilst you were telling me the story. You told me about the Hummingbird Moths while I was reading a book in which the protagonist flies into dreams through moths. You asked to introduce me to your book club group then a day later an electric hair raising feeling came over me and I texted to find out the book in question. The Hummingbird’s Daughter, you told me and I swear the ceiling lifted and stars fell into my living room because of this book’s significance in my magical mystery tour. Stay tuned.
When I was four years old I had a recurring dream in which I caught a hummingbird in my grandmother’s garden, which metamorphosed into a flat stone bearing an equilateral cross while in my tiny hands. It’s a vivid dream; I can recall at 52 how the garden felt at four, the hazy light, the whir of the wings so close to me beating in time with my little girl bird coveting heart, the perfume of apples warmed by Okanagan sun. The tiny swath of road populated by a swing and a teeter totter along which I wandered, holding the bird cupped tenderly. The moment I opened my fingers ever so slightly, afraid of the stillness within and found my delight flattened into grey stone. But something more than just stone. Larger than grown up concerns. Secrets fluttering into my world carrying knowledge from other lifetimes.
When my grandmother passed some twenty years later she brought me back to that dream. It began with her opal broach, falling to the floor. I would pick it up, only to find it on the floor again. A flurry of cards and letters and recipes in her delicate and flowery handwriting kept surfacing without explanation in seemingly random places. And then the day I went running up the stairs to get something, my small children waiting with husband in car, and found myself at a cabinet on the other side of the room, hairs on end, electric with wonder at how I had gone so far in the wrong direction when I had been in such a hurry. The cabinet was empty to my knowledge. Yet as I opened the door I found a piece of paper on which I had written “the dream” years before. And as my eyes read over the line “an X or cross” in which I described the symbol on the stone that had disappeared my bird, the pot lights overhead lit up. Turned on. The actual real live lights in the room. And NOT all of the lights in the room. Just the few over my head, illuminating the words, and therefore the X symbol from my childhood dream.
Well that was a “can’t make this shit up, can I get a witness” moment to outshine all of the others, literally. And so when an hour later we wandered past a used bookstore in Kensington and I peered through the window to find on the shelf The Hummingbird’s Daughter, well, yes I bought it. The story of a woman who is given a gift by a hummingbird in a dream and becomes a healer and a revolutionary figure, long story short, whose mission is to lessen suffering, and who speaks out in a controversial way against the Catholic Church in old Mexico at the time of the revolution.
The equilateral cross, it turns out, if you must know, is the bridge between human and divine, the message of the original “church of love” that we the people are, turns out, in SHOCKING news, not actually sinners, NOT inherently ruinous and shameful to our deep repressed little cores, BUT rather, that we are inherently loving, made of love by love and that we can’t actually fuck up LOVE. Love (no not the romantic kind) is stronger than our belief in and fear of our inner shittiness. Basically, my life’s teachings in a nutshell, or a four year-old hand. I mean I don’t always get into the backstory, because well, I only like to freak you out in small doses at say Hallow’s Eve and Day of the Dead and sometimes the odd book club, when the story relates.
Truthfully, it’s easy enough to undo pain and suffering without ever calling upon the language of mysticism or Shamanism or synchronicity or spiritual philosophy. Emotion 101 works the same way, we heal emotionally the same way, regardless of whether we have a spiritual experience of it or not, so most of the time I just keep it real, or chill. I’m so chill. Except when you get me going with your super freaky cool moth stories.
Shaman’s talk about The Dreaming, basically what you and I call Monday. Daily life. Reality. They are like “nope, got it wrong, reality is actually the dream”. And what we are all doing here Friends if you will humour me this mystical manic Monday, is to heal the dream, according to shamans which are basically people whose life’s work is to figure this shit out. To find a better way. To use our gift as the girl who goes into dreams does, to heal the fear in the dream, to teach the villain that she is not in fact a villain so she can stop fighting other villains and the nightmare can become a nicer place with kittens and rainbows and calorie free cake. Until we ever so gently wake the fuck up.
So two months ago I leave for a few days vacay and while I am at a friend’s place in Kelowna, a friend who was also a student of mine a few years back—whose Christmas tree crashed to the floor the day after I told her the story of my Christmas tree falling to the floor talk about shared synchronicities (It’s only a tree if you want the full freaky story) —I am writing a blog in her spare room about what your tomorrow self would tell your today self if she only knew (you can see where this is going right) and 45 minutes after I hit send I get a call that my mom has been rushed in for surgery, and I am only an hour away instead of ten, because I am at Angie’s in Kelowna. So, I head to my mom’s and I have been here ever since, reading a book in my spare minutes about a young girl who goes into dreams to heal them through moths that fly out of her mouth, taking care of my mom in my grandmother’s town while you are visited by moths and feathers and read the book that symbolized my entire life’s journey.
Why am I sharing this with you today? Because the world has turned upside down. The dance feels kind of like a bizarre flash mob with inappropriate timing and the wrong music. If I can drop a feather from my window and have it land in your hand, raise your eyes from the winged harbinger of death to the unkillable love within you and bring that to life, well the global isn’t quite so big and round anymore.
I once worked with a little girl who was having night terrors of technicolour monsters and could not sleep alone. I sat with her one day, holding her hand and we went into her dream together, to talk it out with the main monster. We helped him feel a little less scared, so he was a little less scary. And the terrors vanished. Just. Like. That.
So thank you for letting me into your dream you super freak you. I promise to do my best to walk the better way with you, in strangely choreographed beauty, away from fear, lies and technicolour monsters and toward the warm hand of the mother who is wise and well.
— Love Erin P.S. You’ve been asking me how to get your friends and loved ones the help I’ve been able to give you. We can do that. Contact me and we’ll talk details.
P.P.S. One of the kindest things you can do for me is to share my writing. If you enjoyed today’s Monday Musing and know someone else who would please forward it to a friend.
P.P.P.S. You can also follow me on Instagram, for real time updates, funnies and photos!
