(Friday, December 23, 2016, Cullan’s 34th birthday / moon: waning crescent Scorpio / tarot: Judgement)
As I lie in bed on my day off, this hidden dream percolates back into my consciousness:
Coworker Akina from our office in Guandong, China is visiting. She is staying with our boss Daneen in Woodbury, near Newport. [Akina is beloved by our marketing team. She is a great sport and has gone both snowshoeing and bowling with us. She is so tiny (under five feet tall) that lifting a bowling ball is quite a challenge for her. We had to find special, child-size snowshoes to fit her little feet. China doll.]
Akina has been doing some local sightseeing. She has discovered a few hidden, magical houses. I head out on my own to examine them, because I have decided that living close to my work is an important change I want in my life.
The atmosphere outside of the office is the etheric grey that often appears in my dreams. A grid that forms the streets and neighborhoods of the entire metropolitan community, the underlying matrix created by city planners, is visible within the grey field.
Most of the city blocks, the squares of the matrix, are empty. Undeveloped. But soon one of the hidden houses that Akina found shows itself to me, manifests from the etheric fog.
It is a Tudor-style house built from beautiful rough stones that shimmer with mica. The stones are different shapes, sizes and colors, put together in a free-form sculptural way that is visually captivating. Powerful, spontaneous, wild and perfect. Half of the house is the residence of a commanding, important male owner. Magician. The other half is rented to a quietly poetic woman and her small son.
Day notes:
At our Solstice Dreamsters gathering I shared my recent dream of the white castle and talked about the recurrence of that human-created stone surface in my dreams. I also read Daniel Ladinsky’s translation of Rumi’s poem “The China Doll In Us.” The poem ends with this verse: “The china doll in us, at some point, will no longer break. It is then you will find you have the ability to heal others, in a way few in this world can.” I did not even realize until the next day that the poem I had chosen explained the core of my dream. In my dream I decide to share my space with other teachers, and the alchemically created walls are surely the Philosopher’s Stone. China (porcelain) is clay that is heated to the point where silica transforms into quartz. Stone.
Wanting to live close to my work is about changing my work from design to sculpture. My clay studio is already in my house.
Peter led a lovely meditation on Monday that went through all of the chakras, calling out their colors. For the crown chakra, rather than the commonly ascribed colors of purple or white, he used “etheric grey.” Suddenly the curious and common grey of my dreams made sense. After all of these years!
I finished my most recent “china doll” sculpture this week (Edie). My coworker Katie gave birth to her six-pound infant daughter Edie Jane.
My grandmother nicknamed me “Doll Face.” I was petite with long, dark eyelashes.
Akina is from the Far East and is staying/sleeping east of the river (Newport). But she is working west of the river and scouting for homes in Mendota (Mnidota). To the Dakota, this place is the origin of creation. As the Black Hills are to the Lakota.
January 4: Daneen told us today in an email that Akina will be visiting in about a week.
