Last night, the night after the lunar eclipse, I had a dream of being in a crowd of people somewhere and being approached by a dark-haired woman in a white blouse. I did not know her, but she put her arm around me as if she knew me well, and I felt safe with her by my side. She loved me, and seemed to know me well.
I knew her as kin—even more than kin—and felt flooded with a deep, subtle ecstasy that spread through every filament of my being, thinking, Oh! This is what love is!
Then, as I moved on through the crowded room, I encountered a tall man in a gray tweed jacket, his face strong and gentle, his gaze upon me familiar. He also put an arm around me and kissed my hair. Again I experienced that subtle, spreading warmth of something I had never felt before, as if I had found my own people for the first time in my life. I had been found by my people, the ones who knew me as well as I knew myself. With them I never again needed to pretend I was anybody other than who I was!
It faded with the dawn.
It was hard to wake up this morning to the homely imperfections of my real life, and yet those two beings were also part of my ‘real life,’ and my feelings for them I will never forget. The love I felt with them was a love I had never experienced before.
It was as if a closed door had opened, showing me another stream of sensation I now have access to, no matter what else is happening in and around me.
The night before, I couldn’t sleep, so I got up at 3:30am and watched the eclipse, dozing on and off as the earth moved into position between the sun and the moon and very gradually shut out the light. Bit by bit the light dimmed to burnished gold and then antique reds until only a rim of dark color indicated the moon in the dark sky. Our moon, but not our moon.
And then, imperceptibly, a sliver of intense brightness shone through, and grew slowly, oh so slowly, until the brilliance of the moon was again revealed.
The neighborhood was still and silent, as was I sitting at the bedroom window wrapped in my shawl, even as the earth rotated on its axis and made revolutions at great speeds through a solar system that, itself, also spiraled through space.
Light and dark…Stillness and motion. Both.
I remember my first camping trip when I was in my teens, in the Mt. Marcy Range of the Adirondacks, with a group of fellow students at Deerwood music camp. We were out for a week in the wilderness, making our way to the summit of Mt. Marcy where we would spend the last night of our trip.
For me, a New York city girl, the sight of the sun sinking to our east while the full moon rose to our west was a startling revelation. And then again in the morning, the moon fading in the east and the sun rising in the west came as a shock! I knew the words, but experiencing the reality was something entirely different; I could feel it, it was ecstatic, it was imprinted in my bone marrow as undeniable truth.
I know I keep recalling it in these pieces, but I wish to recreate that mystical memory every way I can, what I felt at 15 at the peak of Mt. Marcy, when the sun rose red to the west, and the air was still.
I felt it on my skin, my bone marrow, my eyeballs! That was a rich glimpse of where the physical world and the ineffable met, and it changed my life!
I wonder, who were those beings in my dream? Where did they come from? Have they been here all my life in the wings, not showing themselves until now? What layer of the world have they revealed to me, that I now can enter? Will they continue to appear in my dreams?
Did they show up just now for a specific reason?
Are they my ‘Guardian Angels?’
