Dream is Two Today
It’s an overripe moment, Roses so full and heavy they are both dry from the late summer sun and damp from the autumn rains. It's the second anniversary of Dream Hive. The Ginko tree is turning yellow and the air is both crisp and pensive. It’s a good time for Yoga, relational spirituality, silent meditation and singing together. I never imagined we would be a circle that reached across the world, a global school for unlearning, a borderless territory for soul activism. Dream is so much more than the downtown yoga studio we built, in just two years we have grown tremendously. We are a rose garden that lives in the minds and hearts of our community, a place to gather and do the work that heals and integrates.
It’s the blood moon coming in and I can almost see her, Kali Ma, with her Mala of skulls-- the heads will roll, the patriarchy must come down, she is waking up inside of us, ready to express her justified rage, to bring the fire of transformation and transmutation. I can almost feel the mother warrior energy, its edgy to have your mother breast feeding you while she slays dragons, but that’s what is happening now. Not sure if I am the mother or the child, or if it even matters.
The forests are on fire again, the smoke blows all the way across the landmass of the Americas, the smoke and the drought and the heavy rains and the tears and the pulsing arousal and dormancy of eros. Are you feeling that? How can the erotic live in a world that is crumbling? Yet, even the most thoughtful people I know are still seeking connection and love and some are bringing them in (children), though not everyone. The children are brought in, we bring them in, even in a war, even when the sun is so hot it's burning the flesh of our roses. I think that death can inspire eros, but not stress. Oh the stress of parenting ourselves, never mind children.
I've been a mother to Dream Hive, and have been learning there what I have learned as a mother of children. It's heartbreaking service, mostly punctuated by tears and mostly unpleasant but also sacred and a tremendous privilege full of so much meaning, it's growing me up and a good way to continually kill the ego. It's like submerging a gong in a pool of water over and over again. There is an exhibition at the Rubin Museum right now where you do just that. The instructions ask you to imagine that the sound of the mallet hitting the gong is your anger and then you are told to submerge it.
I was a Buddhist once and thought seriously about ordination, but I was too addicted to karma and that is sort or the way I see mothering and also starting a project like Dream, its karmic, and getting into the dharma of it is exquisite and treacherous but ahhhmazing when you get there. Like the moments when you watch your child sleep on their sheepskin, just an instant of relief in a 24 hour cycle of suffering but oh what a window into true love and liberation.
What we are doing now is deadheading the roses, so they can be full. This process involves the past and the present and the future, it kind of assumes that the roses of tomorrow are the roses of today, that we are our ancestors, that we are learning one thing, all together, that we are one circle that is passing the light and filtering the tears and vesseling a space to dance, grieve, live. We are a circle at Dream, a space that is created by the people who sit into it.
What is the thing that we are doing? Maybe it is that we are learning how to pulse, how to go within and reach out to one another, how to cultivate a garden of roses, how to tend to it and how to notice the space within the clearing of thorny roses and step inside.
HK