Category: Denise

(Thursday, January 28, 2016) moon: waning gibbous Libra / tarot: Magician-Witch

I am scheduled to take a trip with a large group of people, but I am running late. I rush into my bedroom closet, rummage the top shelf, only to discover that my mother has already packed my things for me. I’m relieved and grateful. The prerequisite for this trip is that we must all travel lightly. Carry very little baggage.

Mother and I hurry outdoors to the railyard. Either the dream skips, or I have lost the memory of the journey. Suddenly we arrive at another train station and are walking along the elevated wooden platform. At the end of the platform we find an art gallery built of grey adobe. Small, illuminated display windows are inset deep into the outer gallery walls. It’s a heavenly, blue-sky day so the gallery doors are wide open, inviting us and the other members of our travel club to meander into the space.

The gallery footprint is large and square, with a high white ceiling and white stucco walls. The floorboards are shiny, aged golden oak. Painted white sculpture stands, built in ziggurat form, are set against the walls. Colorful, translucent pieces of handblown glass artwork fill the room. Some of the sculptures are animals, some are abstract shapes like mountains or clouds.

The gallery owner, a tall, friendly gentleman with dark hair, is standing behind one of the sculpture stands. Our eyes meet and I gasp in joy and amazement: at the very top of the display is a huge glass serving platter with my name, Denise Luther, scripted in glass in the center of the dish. I am a simple tourist, just passing through this little town. How did this beautiful coincidence, this transcendent synchronicity, come together so perfectly?

I ask my mother for my camera but we cannot find it in our bags. One of my traveling companions, another dark-haired gent, kindly takes a photograph of the platter for me. By the time I am able to locate my own camera, the serving dish has disappeared.

Day notes:

I awoke with an overwhelming feeling of magic. Of being gifted. Completely happy. Seeing my name in the center of the glass touched the center of my heart.

Still reading Connie Kaplan’s book “The Invisible Garment.” My midheaven is in Service. Is there a connection between service and serving platter? Am I being served (by art)? Am I (and my creativity) in service to others?

I have a turkey platter that was handed down to me by my favorite uncle (via my mother). Charlie Wolf had been a Minneapolis cop. Years ago, when skid row was in the Gateway district, he helped a homeless man who repaid him with the shiny serving dish. Today on my lunchbreak I went to visit the wild turkeys. I have found that if I go to a certain park in Mendota at 11:30 I can watch a flock of a dozen turkeys walk slowly through the woods.

Every element of this dream has lightness. Light baggage. Passing through. The joy of being on vacation. Viewing art. Translucent glass. Evaporation of a physical object. Photography. A warm, loving relationship with my mother. Santa Fe skies and fragrant, pure air to fill my lungs.

Nameplate. 

From dreammoods: “To see stained glass in your dream signifies spiritual healing and enlightenment. You are seeking guidance from a higher source.”

I seem to be with my soul group in this dream. Relaxed and supported.

I am journeying to my soul work, my creativity, very late in life (The West), but I am arriving with joy and energy, nonetheless.

 

(Friday, January 15, 2015) moon: first quarter Aries / tarot: Spiderwoman (Wheel of Fortune, Fate)

Chris and I are exploring a house we have just moved into. It is a big old house, in need of some attention. The floor plan feels perfectly square. The house is a single story, built over a full basement.

We have entered the house through the very large kitchen. Country kitchen. Fields of tall prairie grass are visible through every window. No trees. The floor is covered in worn linoleum, deep red with flecks of grey, black and white. (The ambience of the room reminds me of my aunt Bernadine’s farmhouse on Snake Creek, at the edge of the Whitewater State Park, near Minneiska. Bern and my uncle Lawrence never made any changes to the decor of their home in all my childhood visits. The furniture was from the forties, probably all purchased right after their wedding. The floor beneath the chrome-legged dining table was covered by an old grey sheet of linoleum. The edges of the room were exposed planks of wood that had lost their sheen years before.)

I decide to get to work. I peel up the dusty linoleum, uncovering rough-hewn and aged wooden boards. I will have to hire someone to repair and refinish the floor. Then I notice a thick, rectangular pane of glass that is fitted into the floor and subflooring. Chris and I peer through the glass, into the lower level, which is filled with antique furniture. Was the previous owner a collector, an antique dealer?

Intrigued, we head down the stairs into a square room with a square wooden table covered in large sheets of drawing paper. I examine the pencil drawings and recognize them as the work of a local, well-known artist. I say his name. Chris doesn’t know him, and I forget his name when I awake. I look about the room and notice plenty of small spiders and their webs. Dust everywhere. I will have to hire someone to clean up the basement.

I raise my eyes to look at the wall farthest from me. It is curved, made of cinder-colored brick, with a small black oven in the middle of it. The iron oven door is open. I look to my right. The wall continues to arc. A second oven door is visible. I look left, and behind me. The brick wall creates a full circle that surrounds us, with four oven doors at 90 degree angles to each other. Like the nodes of a compass or a medicine wheel. The room is no longer square. Squaring the circle, circling the square.

Now Chris and I are intrigued by the circle of ovens. The brick wall runs from the basement floor to the ceiling, like a medieval tower or turret. We wonder if the formation is present in the upper story, if there are fireplaces upstairs as well.

We bound up the stairs. But my awareness shifts left, to the outside of the house. An enormous spider, tall as a building, iridescent colors shimmering on her black shell, is walking carefully, slowly along the clay road.

Day notes:

Unbelievable to me that I draw the Spiderwoman card in the tarot this morning. And when I shower, I notice a pea-sized red mark on one of my ribs (left side). Spider bite? Generally, online dictionaries say spider dreams are about being ensnared in the web of a mother’s power. To the Hopis, spider is about weaving and the creative force. I have been reading Connie Kaplan’s  “The Invisible Garment” which defines aspects of our beingness as the warp and weft of our spirit garment.

Another dream of home. Today I get an email from Wisdom Ways (Sisters of St. Joseph Carondelet). Kevin Kling is giving a presentation in April about home: “In life’s journey it seems home has gone from a place that is, to one I remember, to one I create.” The email also includes a phrase from the Irish scholar John O’Donahue: “the clay that forms us.” I recently checked out one of O’Donahue’s books from the library (“Anam Cara, A Celtic Book of Wisdom”). Every line of that book is a poem.

I have started painting the upstairs bedrooms, which were last painted 18 years ago.

Second dream of ovens this week. I have not recorded the other dream. In that dream, my mother-in-law works at a huge iron and brick oven that takes up one whole wall in her kitchen. Handmade ceramic pots cover the floor around her. That oven must be a kiln. I have been considering going back to school and getting a sculpture degree. State credits are $10 after the age of 62. My mother-in-law Kay’s deathbed message: “Don’t wait to do what you love.” The tarot card I drew the day of this dream was the three of pentacles, which in my deck is called Claywoman. The image is a woman making pots outdoors, with an adobe kiln/oven behind her.

According to Z. Budapest, the colors associated with The Fates are black, white and red.

 

 

 

(Tuesday, December 29, 2015) moon: Leo / tarot: Judgement

I am at the dream conference in Virginia Beach. Tallulah, from the IASD, is giving me a tour of my dream/soul house. She walks alongside me, at my left shoulder. The house is two stories, a very long rectangular box with no roof pitch that I can discern. We are on the second story. A straight hall with a wooden floor runs through the center, with rooms on either side.

Everything in the house has been created by hand, with the greatest love and skill. A vibration of the sacred emanates from all of the decorative elements. The furniture is finely carved wood, delicately elegant, in the colonial Federal style. One bedroom has shimmering cobalt blue, magenta and silver walls, like a beautiful oil painting of a moon rise. Another room is carved plaster with pearly white blossoms and a soft, peach-colored background. Tallulah tells me that peach is the state color of Virginia, which I find curious. When I think of peaches, I think of Georgia.

Day notes:

In Japan, the peach blossom symbolizes virginity.

One web definition of virgin: http://dreamstop.com/virgin-dream-symbol/

On the web, the name Tallulah is ascribed conflicting origins, Choctaw or Irish. The Choctaw meaning is leaping water, the Gaelic is fruitful woman. Tallulah Falls is a town in Georgia, homeland of the Choctaw tribe. Philip Seymore Hoffman’s daughter’s name is Tallulah.

I met Tallulah at the first Virginia Beach conference. I was in her morning dream group with Bonnie, Lou and Dr. Larry Burk. Larry Burk has researched and written a book about warning dreams of breast cancer called “Let Magic Happen.” Today my coworker Cyndi told me her breast cancer has spread to her spine, ribs, clavicle and shoulder.