I am ready to complete the ritual. ... behind me, I see dozens of women arriving, filling all the chairs.

The Dream of Returning: Wrestling with Reality, Power, and the Listening World

Though it feels as if our old stories are melting, no one knows what comes next. That’s part two of the workshop. Where we wake up as a new story opens around us. It’s always this way. It’s never easy - it happens. We learn from it. Things change.

After the election, as grief and fury buzzed around me, I felt something else. Oh, I felt the sadness, too, the disappointment — but there was more. A deep, quiet pull back to something I couldn’t quite name. This wasn’t about any one leader or result. It was a reminder, a calling, like an ancient voice just beyond reach, urging me to listen, to see.

Then last night, I had a dream.

I’m driving past a small wooden building at the center of a large snowy field, when halfway down the road, I feel myself pulled backwards. As if my car is caught in a net of power, a force field I can’t resist—and it is calling me to return. Oh, yes. I remember, my dreaming self thinks. I’ve been here before.

I’d started this workshop once, but I left before I could see it through. Now, I pull to the side of the road and, abandoning my car, I crunch through the snow, making my way back.

I am returning to the workshop. There is only one other student, a woman who arrived a few minutes before me. One teacher is in the other room. The other explains, “We are about to enact a ritual. We will enter into an ancient story, each of us taking on different roles. As we enter the ritual, we will forget who we are for a while.” Like actors, stepping into a role, we would play rough-hewn men, dressed in flannel and boots. We would face hardship and struggle, the teacher explains. “It won’t be easy.”

Indeed, I think. This is why I left before finishing last time — but I know there is a part two to this ritual play that I have to complete. In doing so, I will wake up as myself. I will shed the role - the pretense of trying to be anyone but me. I will step into the truth of my unmasked self.

Inside of the dream, I can feel the rising of a strange and unyielding power, a force moving through me that is not entirely “of me”— a force that guides from within but also, from without.

I feel this force around me. I feel myself feeding it - even as it feeds me. A force that is also a fabric, connecting me to everyone, to everything.

I am ready to complete the ritual. The teachers call me in to receive my assignment. Before I step forward, I glance back and there, behind me, I see dozens of women arriving, filling all the chairs. Did they see my car my the road? I wonder, as I begin to wake up. Maybe, I think. Or perhaps they were always part of this story, waiting until the time was right.

Photo by Summer C on Unsplash

So, let’s talk about this dream, beginning with the car that I left by the side of the road.

In the language of dreams and symbols, this car is not just a vehicle. It’s a story — it’s THE story that drives us, the ideas that steer us before we even know that we’re moving. Most days, we’re carried along by narratives that were written long before we were born. In stepping out of the car and walking on my own, I took agency over the direction of my own steps - my own life.

This reminds me of the body’s own wisdom, so easily overlooked. We lose ourselves in the rush, driven by demands that often have little to do with what truly sustains us.

Just days ago, my own body sent quiet signals, whispers to skip the latte, to eat the red grapefruit that, despite my usual dislike, appeared suddenly irresistible. I ignored my body’s increasingly less subtle pushes to lie down and nap. And then yesterday evening, I felt a sharp pain, like the stab of a knitting needle that I couldn’t dismiss. Worried, I swallowed an Advil and went to bed, imagining all kinds of scary.

Then, this morning, while describing my symptoms - the backache, the overall ick, the stabby pains - to my husband, I (finally) got the message. I peed on a test stick and it bloomed bright purple. Yay! I do not have the inexplicable lower belly disorder. It’s a Urinary Tract Infection.

I am eating grapefruit even as I type this.

Our bodies, after all, are our connection to the world’s deep, webbed fascia, the network of energy and memory that holds us all. As Jeannine Ouellette writes in “One Tiny Knot Lets Go”, her gorgeous contemplation on the “macrocosmic web that holds all of us together as one organism, stretching and flexing and connecting the entire human race and beyond that, the planet itself, as we move, grow, live, love, fight, heal, die.”

Like the fascia that enwraps our entire body, connecting every muscle and bone, every organ and nerve cell, the invisible tissue of this “macroscopic web” is the fabric of life. It connects our bodies to the earth’s body, and by that connection to all of her creatures and plants. It connects us intimately and intricately to every stone and river.

It also, and get this, connects every Democrat to every Republican (and vice versa). We are all, like it or not, in this together.

Just as fascia holds us together, this dream reveals the ways we’re threaded through with power we don’t always understand. Each choice, each moment of noticing, of naming what is real, knits us closer to that connection.

I am a dreamer. I receive vivid imagery in my sleep, when my defenses are down and the busyness of daily life ebbs away. I also receive guidance while my eyes are wide open - so do you. And right now, a dream is playing out across the screens of our collective dream: the American election.

My dream was personal - a woman returning to complete a workshop of self-agency. It was also about the US Election. Two women — one in the other room, one here right now, offering a workshop in what it might look like when a woman dares to claim her power.

Political leaders invite us into new stories, lighting up visions of what could be. Hilary was one lantern bearer, Kamala another, each woman embodying a new story, a possible new way of living in our complex world. And yes, Trump has a lantern too. He represents another story, another version of reality. And this is the story that America chose this time. Still, no matter the election outcome, politicians don’t choose for us; they simply show us what’s available. In the end, it’s not about them. The power lies in our choice, in the story we decide to live, whether or not the outcome we wished for was realized. Leaders can open doors, but it’s up to us to step through, to get out of the car of the old story and leave it behind. To walk forward into whatever waits for us.

I do not believe that this only proves we need to fight harder next time. I do not believe that the democratic party needs to figure out what went wrong and mock up a new way of convincing voters their way is better. I believe we are witnessing the emergence of a new way, a new story — a new road. I don’t believe the new road is the dark road of Donald Trump’s conjuring. He’s just the catalyst that broke the car. He got everyone out by the side of the road to walk back to the workshop.

There, we will all have to complete the ritual. I believe the new story will be something truly new. Something which perhaps, from where we are right now, trudging through the snow toward a difficult experience, we cannot envision. First things that we have been attached to are going to fall apart.

We are in an elemental shift, Maria Popova wrote in her ‘emergency post’, “A Lighthouse for Dark Times”, “when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another.”

It is happening now. “This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself.”

We were made for these times. We are ready.

---

A few years ago, during Hilary’s campaign, I had a dream that feels related to this one. I dreamed that Oprah and I were standing before her magic generosity closet, a large armoire stacked with boxes of all shapes and sizes. In this dream, Oprah gave you what you most needed. My gift was a shoe box - but, Oprah told me, “You have to open it yourself.”

I did - and inside were a pair of beautiful high heeled shoes. As I woke up, I was still holding the shoes in my hands. I heard the lyrics of a song “I do believe it’s true, there are roads left in both of our shoes…” I understood (a little bit) that these were shoes meant for new journeys, new stories. In accepting them, I felt the invitation to walk forward, to choose the path that was mine. I understood that this was the path “where soul meets body” another lyric from the same song.

Dream Shoes

The ‘dream shoes” that I received from Oprah, our modern representative of the Great Mother, whose gifts of Grace arrive from ‘out of the blue” - like the feather that falls into your palm, the phone call that changes your life — or the dream of a workshop we have yet to complete. Gifts of Grace invite us to return, again and again, and with each visit, to discover the quiet, listening world, the elemental presence that receives and responds to our every move. The act of getting out of the car, of turning back to the workshop— even my willingness to get up in the middle of the night to write down these dreams.

It’s all part of the same sacred task that all are given by Grace: the invitation to pay attention (or not) to the messages streaming steadily toward us. The invitation to choose (or not) to become who we already are. To tap into the fabric of all creation, grounded in our magical shoes, and fill with power.

Though it feels as if our old stories are melting, no one knows what comes next. That’s part two of the workshop. Where we wake up as a new story opens around us. It’s always this way. It’s never easy - it always happens.

You will know it when it’s your turn to play your part. And then just like in my dream, you will be offered the choice: Will you return to the workshop or will you go back to the car you left by the road? Will you climb back in and let life and other peoples’ plans lead your way? Or will you join the teachers of grace at the workshop. Will you complete the program. Will you to reach into the infinite and abundant “generosity closet” of the world and claim your new shoes?

It’s up to you.
It was always up to you.
This is Act Two of the play.
Welcome back.

---