Firewood, Deadwood

(Friday, January 29, 2016) moon: waning gibbous Libra / tarot: seven of wands reversed

I have moved into an old cream-colored two-story stucco house, built around one hundred years ago. It is a city house, but located in a neighborhood with large lots. The front of the house has a huge, rusting metal decoration over a section of the upper floor that looks to me like a subtle, faded face. Ghost of a face.

When I stand in the front yard and look behind the house, I can see mountains and forests, stretching for miles and miles.

The house is a little sad and neglected. I walk inside. Above a back stairwell I notice a tall mesh bag with a few logs of firewood inside. The bag hangs from the redwood-beamed ceiling of the attic loft. I need to replenish the firewood, so I walk up the stairs into the scarlet-colored loft space to figure out how to do this.

There is a dark-haired woman standing in the attic, behind the mesh bag and near the eaves. I know that she is a ghost. She has lost her child and is inconsolably bereft. She clasps her elbows and forearms with her hands, rubbing them over and over with great anxiety. Is it possible to comfort a spirit? I walk over to her and begin to caress her arms, surprised to feel that they are transforming from the ethereal. Turning into wood.

Day notes:

I am spending all of my free time painting the upper bedrooms of our house. I think that must be why I am having so many dreams of houses that need work.

Fuel for the fire coming from the upper realms? Needing replenishment.

My grandmother’s house had a woodbox built next to the kitchen. The box was filled with firewood from the outside of the house. It had a door inside the kitchen, near the wood-burning stove, so one could stoke the fire in the winter without having to go outdoors. The mesh bag in my dream seems to serve a similar purpose.

My coworker Cyndi (who has stage 4 breast cancer) emailed us an x-ray today of her latest femur surgery. They inserted a rod into her hip and another into her “good” femur. X-rays look very ghostly. Her living bones are slowly being transformed into metal rods and brackets.