First Quarter Moon: the Owl returns
First Quarter Moon: the Owl returns
dream work, a poem, and more yoga poetry radio
This photo was taken at 10:15 the night after sending out my last letter for First Quarter Moon, where I declared Owl as a theme.
I wrote then that it is her medicine that began this newsletter, with the nighttime and the moon, ever friendly with endings and coming to terms with loss. Owl sees into the dark and brings omens and symbols through dreams and meditation. Owl sees through deception and the things that make us uncomfortable.
And then that very night Owl sat in the tree in front of my house and watched while my neighbors and I stood beneath her and stared back. I wouldn’t have known she was there except I got a text from Amy, neighbor and reader, as I was getting ready for bed, which read, “There’s an owl out here!”
Showing up, as if to signify I am on the right path. Thanks, Mom.
I took a dream workshop this past weekend with Chanti Tacoronte-Perez at Devanadi yoga studio in my own Minneapolis neighborhood.
It was a dreamlike experience.
I walked up the gentle Linden Hill in the mornings and back down again when all was said and done. The space was a building that I had seen from the outside a million times but had never been inside, and soon I was making a sleeping nest on the floor and having visions of my dream shape heading out into the world.
It was a shift in perspective for me, Chanti’s welcoming of the dreamer. She approached the intimate subject of sleep and dreams with enthusiasm. It was a real insight to me to watch her model that way of relating to the dream-state.
I came in knowing that something had gotten in the way of my dream yoga progress but I couldn’t figure out what the obstacle was. I described it as a regression, I had initially been able to stay in what Chanti calls “the liminal space” and play with that line between lucid and mindless. At first I had a couple mornings where I floated in between dream and awake when I practiced. But then I couldn’t do it anymore.
That state became suddenly elusive. There seemed to be a threshold that I suddenly passed over when I woke and once drawn into the awake world I couldn’t go back.
So I brought my question to her. When I first wake up and remember my dream, how do I move into words and real-life in order to write it down?
She suggested I stay totally still and take my time. Which was in line with our practice over the whole weekend.
She told me how it is for her when she can’t remember, she returns to her favorite sleeping position and then she finds her dream.
And even as I write this to you, I can now recognize in my words the thing that got in the way of the dream ability, the thing that I could finally make contact with when I practiced her instructions.
This morning when I woke, my body was still in the bed, but my mind rushed forward, sending its traces into that outside world of life and living, instead of staying with the dreamer. My mind moved on, grasping for that me-memory of where I was last, who and what I was, in order to put on all those daily trappings of our social order.
That is what pulls me right out of the space of the dream.
And from there, I wrote this dream poem:
The Lone Wolf
Sometimes as I write,
I remember how
from the very first
with her disease --
it was the selfing
(or lack there of?)
that she battled with.
Waking up in the new places
without a trace back
to who
or what she was
and her desperate grasping
to find
and re-attach
to whatever that was
(or was not)
I don’t know what--
if there is any thing
that this signifies.
It’s just to say
it's a thing that I do too
re-attach
in the morning time
when I leave my wolfish dreams behind
in the bed where I lay
and strive out
into the world. I made 2 new yoga podcasts this week. There are both short. One a sort of walking meditation and the other another breath protocol. Click through the link below and try them out:
Much love, Tina