Germination

Signs of life at the fertile edge of dreaming

Each morning on the edge of dreaming, my unconscious casts the seeds it would love for my conscious mind to germinate into full-fledged writing to share. But the timing of weather and season have rarely been right.

For a long while, I wanted to talk about the wild events of this spring.

Back in April, my partner and I were given less than two weeks’ notice to move out of our off-the-books tiny home. We were of course lucky enough to catch Covid our first and only time in the middle of those two weeks, leaving us with mere days to not only pick up all our belongings but figure out where we were going to land -- with no means to drive ourselves anywhere, to boot. That we made it through the chaos with any kind of grace was purely thanks to the help of a local friend with incredible physical stamina to go with her generous heart, along with some slightly dishonestly acquired Paxlovid. In the end, nearly all of our stuff ended up in storage an hour away, and we found refuge in a decent motel room as well as a series of local Airbnbs that were way too expensive for what they were. Well, that’s the San Francisco Bay Area for you these days.

We were about two or three weeks out from our Sufi school’s first-ever in-person retreat when all that initially went down. Did you know that you need three months left on your passport to fly directly from the US to Sweden, where we were hosting the retreat, but at least six to fly to Denmark, our initial destination? Alas -- we didn’t. We ourselves learned of this discrepancy with, miraculously, just enough time to act. Mushtaq immediately initiated his passport renewal and had it expedited. He could have been on that flight with me. But, someone dropped the ball at the passport service, and it wasn’t meant to be.

So, I got on the plane for my very first trip overseas, then ran my very first retreat -- alone.

I’ve wanted so much to write about that too. But one thing I’ve learned from the past few months is that some experiences are so momentous that they demand we settle down afterward into the earth and lie seemingly dormant for a while. To watch, wait, and be still, dependent on our inward reserves.

One of the earlier kernels of guidance I was given in my own spiritual training was to “wait for the second feeling.” This means watching for what else arises in oneself following one’s initial emotional reaction or interpretation around a happening, especially a happening that brings up a lot of internal “stuff”. It’s advice I’ve probably taken overmuch to heart here and there where I could have let the first reactions blaze up to my benefit. But in general, it has served me well as a practice. Not every life event needs a super deep, edgy personal narrative built up around it just because it is intense. True initiations are primal. Inherently magical, even, in their ability to enact immense change. But in a certain sense they are not special at all.

The winds have settled, the hard rain has eased to mist. It’s been long enough. Dormancy is done.