My youngest son jumped into the car, excited to be going to the park after school. We buckled up our seatbelts and prepared for departure. As I pulled out of my driveway, I noticed a bird flying past my open window. It was unusual the way he was flying, like he was being propelled through the air. His wings weren’t even beating, just pressed against his side. What bird flies like that?, my mind wondered. I should know what kind of bird that is, being that I fancy myself a birder, but I couldn’t think of it.
As we pulled out of our neighborhood, that same kind of bird (it can’t be the very same bird, can it?) is flying past our window again, wings pressed against his side as he soared. “Look at that,” my son says. “Look at how that bird is flying!” We marveled at it together. “I wish I could fly like that,” he says wistfully.
I CAN fly like that, I almost said out loud. I learned how to do that before. No, you did not, my rational brain said back. But I did. Remember? When?, said my rational brain. The memory was so real. I could feel the way the air felt on my shoulders, the way I learned to lean my body to keep my flight momentum. I tried to place that memory, to convince myself it was real. I could not think of when it would have been, where I might have been, that I learned to fly like that. But I am sure that it happened.
See, I was right, said my rational brain. This never happened. It must have been a dream, then. Do I dream of flying?
The other night, my husband wanted to watch a movie with me. In the movie, the woman finds herself going feral. She is running with the dogs in the night, or perhaps it is all a dream. She has strange experiences and desires, becoming more animalistic in her thoughts and habits. Her body even changes, or she imagines it is changing. Through this experience, she is transformed. She remembers who she really is and gains the courage to stand up for her dreams.
I wonder what it’s like to be a wild woman. I think I remember that I was, somehow, but the memory is lost to me, like flying without wings.
Our dreams are believed to be the place where our subconscious mind can emerge. Lately my dreams have been about journeys, trips that I was supposed to make or was going to make. These dreams have been frequented by people who never used to make an appearance in my dreamland, like my high school best friend and my first husband. Am I circling over lost ground, trying to make sense of how I got here? Last night I dreamt I was picking up litter with a mystic, who looked into my soul and told me things that I knew to be true to my core. There is something strange in the air. I find myself waking up in the middle of the night with a knowing that I never had before, but I can’t seem to hold on to what exactly the knowing is about.
Over this past month, I finished a Reiki certification and attunement process. I am a baby beginner, though, and I feel like my Reiki is broken or it is very weak. I am like a fawn trying to stand up on its gangly legs. In this moment, I am not sure what I am doing. On the other hand, though, I am over here making a plan, getting my legs under me. Just when I get nervous about taking the next step, it appears in front of me, in the form of a friend reaching out who is offering just what I need, like a space to practice and those to practice with, opportunities and connections, encouragement and experience. The universe is assisting in birthing this business that I am not sure I can deliver on. It is nudging me like a mother deer, showing me that I, too, can stand on these new legs. Or fly without wings.
At a recent work conference, we explored the idea of “inspiration”. One of the speakers got really deep with this, and explained the entomology of the word “inspire”. He told us it meant “to breath into”. Lately I feel emotional and creative energy rising up into me. What am I breathing into now? What is breathing into me? Maybe is the spirit of the wild women I have been hanging out with, the ones who can talk and paint in light codes, those who can interpret the codes and bring them back to source. It’s the ones who are healers, and the ones who need to be healed. Maybe it is the spirit of the wild ones, the animals that live out in the woods by my house.
I take a walk in the woods on the night of the new moon. It’s that time of year when the weather can’t decide what it wants to be. On one day, it is hot and we are needing our sunscreen and hats. Other days, a sweatshirt hoodie. Last week we were freezing standing outside for a few moments, and on this day, the day of my walk, it is perfect and beautiful, sunny but also somewhat cool. This walk starts out with the unexpected find of a pink heart mushed into the dirt, maybe a toy or a giant eraser that fell out of a nearby geocache. As I continue to walk, I find more hearts, these others composed by nature, or shaped by natural forces: a piece of wood, a bit of Styrofoam, a heart-shaped rock. The universe is telling me that I am loved, that it will provide, and I just need to trust.
I am working through this creative journey through a book called the Artist’s Way. In the book, there are tasks at the end of each chapter to work through, something like therapy. One task was to write a list of 20 activities that you like doing, and then the date that you last did them. Most of the activities I listed were things I had done in the past month. But there were a few that I had not. One of them was backpacking. I keep a camping backpack packed and ready to go in my closet, but it has been collecting dust. I haven’t put it on and gone for an overnight hike in almost a year and a half. I think about this backpack. I have a desire to put that pack on and go for a solo overnight. I think about what it would be like out there in the deep woods of the Lone Star Trail, hearing the wail of coyotes from a pack that surrounds me, and the wild woman inside of me is beating on the door of my heart, saying “Do it! I dare you!”
One of the weekly tasks of the Artist’s Way is to take yourself on an Artist’s Date, something that you do by yourself over a span of say, a couple of hours, that perhaps fills you up creatively. Through this process, I have been exploring some places inside myself that I have never been before, and finding some unexpected bliss. I discovered a passion for ecstatic dance. I feel so absolutely delighted inside myself letting my body just move however it wants to, and visually absorbing all the people around me doing the same. When I dance, I concentrate on different chakras, and releasing energy into the world. Sometimes, when I am really into it, I have found myself growling, yipping, making animal noises that I forgot I could even make. I didn’t realize that feeling was in there, but feels really good to get it out.
And sometimes, on a full moon, I have been known to sit along a creek bank on a magic hill, where no one can see me. I sit and play a small steel-tongued drum, silently inviting all the fairies and wood sprites to come out of the neighboring forest and come sit with me. I can almost see their hazy forms appearing along the woods edge, creeping closer to me, and the birds seem to chirp louder to keep up with the sweet sound of my drum.
And as I make my way back along the creek, walking alongside my shadow, I look back behind me. In the dirt behind me, there are no human tracks. Only a blending of the tracks of coyote and deer, predator and prey, and I am not sure which one is mine.
Or perhaps I am in the sky, flying without beating my wings.
