I've been sick. I feel better. This is a (small and significant) miracle.
On magic and mystery and the medicine of moving through the dream
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I am a pattern reader. I am a poet. I am also a human being in a body that sometimes gets sick. I experience illness and recovery as a dream inside of which I float, slightly sideways of my own body, watching waves of information, temperature and color echo across a field.
For the past month, I’ve been slightly sick - and for a couple of days, acutely sick. Then, this morning, I felt better. I will tell you about the sickness (a little) and then about the thing that happened that reconnected me to myself.
(A little) about the sickness
For me, being sick is all about disconnection. Slowed way down, senses weirdly acute but from a distance. As if I am resting deeply inside of my body, watching the cells flow up and down my blood vessels while it all kind of sings to me. It’s freaky, dreamy, and deep.
Normally, I can pretty easily tune into what my body needs and follow its promptings back to wellness. This one was different. Echoing symptoms that morphed and slid away in minutes. A headache, a leg cramp, a dull ache in the lower belly. One morning, I woke with a sore throat and double ear aches. An hour later, all of that was gone, replaced by (ever so slight) nausea and the intermittent feeling I might tip over.
Two nights ago, over the course of one hour, my husband and I tracked a series of symptoms - hiccups, itchy eyes and weirdly, hives - on the knuckles of my fingers and toes. It’s not that my symptoms aren’t (always) weird, it’s just that normally, I understand them. I read them like Tarot cards. This time, not so much.
During the sick time, my dreams felt jangled. One night, I was flying a helicopter over a highway where a young woman on a red bicycle wove in and out through traffic. From above, I watched her fall, her body (painlessly) breaking into pieces. Another night, I dreamed I was accompanied by a mysterious silent woman. She was familiar but not a personal relation. She was an angel but also, just a woman. She was just there, so steadily I didn’t even notice.
Does this mean that I am not alone?
Sure, but I think something else is in play.
Over the course of this illness, I watch myself coming apart and coming together. One day, I am hyper-focused on naming all the parts of myself. Another day, I remodel my entire business. It feels as if I am surfacing ancient material, roasting fossilized bones over sacred fires. I sing as it cooks down to ash, which I eat, in micro-doses, with a tiny spoon. Each day, I understand a little more - and a little less. This is the medicine. This is the project. Inside of the field of this illness, invisible things are getting done.
This morning, I woke up feeling better, with a clear message inside my head: Take no medicine, no supplements, no healing brews today. Let us sort this out our way.
I got up and dressed and stepped out the back door, headed for the farm. 30 seconds in, the sky opened a deluge and I ran back to the house, huge raindrops pelting me.
This was part of the dream. This was part of the healing. I sat by the window, sipping tea. When it cleared, I tried again.
Rain-washed air, the sky a fabulous blue, huge marshmallow clouds. It was unseasonably warm and, after days of sitting by the window, it felt like spring — or a new world.
I crossed the road and entered the farm. The cows, unable to walk the flooded fields without sinking into mud, were (somewhat comically) standing on mounds of hay. One per mound. Surrounded by puddles. Cow islands.
The puddles, swept by a gentle wind, were rippling. The ripples, reflecting the early morning sun, pulled my attention closer. I squatted down and placed my palms upon the land.
Hands in the wet
Palms against the soil.
I felt something change.
While I was sick, I did what one does - listing my symptoms in search engines, surfing around. I came upon an offer for a grounding mat. The claim, from the Earthing website, is that placing your feet on the grounding mat returns your body to its proper charge.
The earth beneath your feet … provides you with something very surprising - electrons. When you touch the ground with your bare feet or body, the electrons flow into you. This is called being “grounded.1”
We should be getting this naturally, just from walking on the planet, but modern life lifts us off the ground — we live in apartments and fly in planes and sleep in hotel rooms. We sit in front of screens all day, heads literally ‘in the cloud’. In this way, we lose our connection to the natural rhythms of the earth - the always available ‘footing’ that we need, as living parts of creation, to stay healthy, balanced and … well, alive.
Last week, when symptoms kept me cooped up inside, I bought a grounding mat. I liked the sound of it. But now, here I was outside, grounding with the actual ground. Touching the actual earth.
I had the very clear sense of waking up from a dream of being lost. A dream where one moment I was walking down a long corridor of (very gentle) suffering and the next I was crouching on a dirt path, acres of rippling and shimmering and cow islands around me.
It felt… nice. No thunderbolts of healing. Just… nice. I felt alive again (maybe the buzz of those electrons flowing in). I felt more … me.
I stood up and wiped my wet palms against the green pants that I was wearing because my husband said he liked them.
I walked on, looking around. It’s so beautiful here but I noticed that I was still thinking in this really abstracted way, trying to turn everything I was seeing and experiencing into an Instagram photo or a blog post.
I was also noticing that I was thinking about that. I was watching my thoughts and that simple shift in awareness is its own kind of medicine, an opening, making space for different choices to be made - the possibility for change.
And as I reached the top of the hill, that change began to rumble through me. A pulsation was moving upward - from the soles of my feet - as if my whole body was pushing something out, some toxin, some allergen, something I’d accidentally ingested and did not need or want any more. I looked back over the way that I had come and a word moved into my mouth and I spoke it out loud. (This all sounds very dramatic but it was so soft, so simple. Like a sigh.)
That word was “No.” I spoke it out loud, as if I was replying to someone, refusing something.
A moment later, I chuckled. Who am I arguing with? Who will hear me? I chuckled again because of course, no one would hear me- no student or friend or online acquaintance. I wouldn’t get any likes standing out here in the middle of a field. But that didn’t mean that no one was listening.
After all, I was there. I was someone - and I heard me speak that refusal. I had a flash of awareness - a cause, perhaps, for the sickness but I let that go. No, I thought. I don’t need this.
A little more change opened. A little more medicine. I floated back from my illness dream, returning to my own tissue and bone. I felt myself arrive and come awake behind my eyes. I looked out over the land and I saw where I actually was.
“Hello,” I said to the listening fields. “Hello,” I said to the bright blue sky. And the cows perched on their puddle mounds. “Hello,” I told myself as I returned from who knows where. “Hello,” I said, talking to the land as if it hadn’t been there all along, accompanying me like an old friend, a familiar angel.
And so, Hello, I am writing this to you now, three hours after it happened. I am sitting in my car. I was on my way to the store when it all came at once, this rush of words that need speaking and this feeling flowing in behind them.
When I was sick, I floated inside of my body as if my body was a point inside of a field of illness where I traveled, doing something that was inevitable and very important. It had to do with rearranging the parts of myself into some new order. It had to do with melting old shapes of myself into this squishy clay, which I was able to play with, trying out new forms, new faces — new ways of being me in a world that also seemed to be melting.
I learned from this clay that no matter what shape I made, it was always still me. I learned from the play, from the pretending. I learned from moving my dream hands over imaginary versions of myself.
I should take a moment here to say that this imaginal work is my sweet spot - this is what I teach people to do. It’s why I started my own Magic School last summer. I finally understand that magical thinking (and healing and deep visioning) is my medicine. It’s what I do naturally and easily and what I do best.
This morning, when I returned to myself, I laughed. We so often laugh when illusion falls away. Maybe it’s the lightness - that heavy cloak falling from our shoulders. Maybe it’s the twinkles. Of recognition. Oh, I see! Oh, I get it! Something about realization makes people laugh. And, in my case, makes me speak out loud — to myself and also, to fields and cows and wet soil.
“I see you. I see you. And you can see me!”
I asked for a sign that this was true but when I looked all around, there was no sign at all - nothing except for the way that everything just continued to be there, and to be itself. (So, no sign but also, the greatest sign.)
A few minutes later, as I was walking toward home, I spotted a bunny-shaped cloud with one bright blue eye. It floated over my head, as if watching me notice it.
As the eye faded into a puff and then a wisp, I came to the driveway between the farmhouse and the tiny nursery school. And there, three children dressed in puddle boots and rain pants, came out to splash around. They were singing — each a different kindergarten tune. And their father, marveling at the marvelousness of children, smiled at me.
Which is to say that I saw him - and he saw me.
And this is the guidance and the medicine.
This is the miracle of a walk through the farm.
The simple, quiet realization that I am seen by all that I see.
That I am received as I am receiving.
I see you as you see me. Everywhere you go I am there. In every moment, you are accompanied. Even when you forget, even when you don’t notice, even then I am there.
Look up from your phone and walk until you remember. I am here you are here beside me. As you remember me, you know that I am here. As you look at me, you make me real.
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What a beautiful understanding... recognition... I don’t know how to explain it. Will you be sending the grounding mat back?! 😘
Welcome back! Glad you’re feeling better. 😘