Dreaming the World

At sunrise, the sun illumines the brilliant red leaves of our maples. It is a cooler day of sun and cloud, the breeze producing brief showers of leaves from the trees. We’ve moved the overwintering plants into the house and this morning I wander room to room with a watering can.

I’m reading through Natalie Goldberg’s most recent books. In one essay she writes about living in Palo Alto during the early days of the Internet boom. when bright young people, mostly young men, find themselves enormously rich overnight. When she speaks with them she discovers there is no one home, they are unimaginable wealthy, powerful and empty, which saddens her.

Now those not-so young people, still empty, helm the ship of state. They are without empathy and are driven by insatiable hungers which threaten to devour the world. They are suffering the Windigo sickness, the soul eating illness that drives the neo-colonial impulse to consume all without regard for the consequences, and that instils the thought that one will be fine in a world of ever greater suffering. This freezing of awareness is the reason Jesus warned us that wealth makes it almost impossible to get into Heaven.

These rich men are in power, at least in part, because they offer an old, beguiling vision of theft as security, sameness as stability, and control as absolute. They appeal to our comfort, reinforcing our isolation and rootless, and encourage us to refuse to see the suffering all around us, or to understand the implications of distorted seasons and the growing silence of the natural world.

This madness is the birth right passed down from the Pilgrims, fur traders, and Conquistadors. It is the frozen heart and numbed mind carried in our very genes, the Windigo long ago set loose in the world. It is the stuff of prophesy, visions that arose from this continental American earth that instruct us to awaken, acknowledge the harm done to peoples and the environment, and change course while there is still a little time.

Of course, It is painful to stand or sit in that place of awareness and to resist the urge to flee into the fantasy of a safe world. How challenging it is to observe the web of life and relationship crumbling around us! How difficult to keep hope and heart alive. Yet, it is our all so understandable desire to rush away from the real that keeps the Windigo spirit alive and powerful.

One of my mentors describes shamanism as “visionary healing.” When someone asks for aid one goes seeking a vision of what might prove helpful. Often in a visionary state one is reminded that things are just as they must be, then offered possible pathways towards change. It can be a daunting task to accept that the present situation is perfect, that there is no blame, yet that recognition is the necessary starting point for the healing journey.

Sometimes visions come unbidden, immense, and thunderous. Sometimes these visions are prophesies, warnings and offers of hope for times or generations yet to come. Nearly always they leave the receiver shaken, yet strangely moved.

I believe we can take heart and direction from the ancient prophesies that promise a way forward into a healed world. I fervently hope we can resist the endless invitations to despair, without grieving, and to flee. I believe we can care for one another and the living world, build community, and nurture joy.

Let’s do our best, which is all we are asked to do.