Keys of the Goddess

I am back from a trip to England, leading a retreat at a lovely center on the Connecticut shore. On Sunday, I made the long trek here from a country hotel in a Somerset villlage with the unlikely name of Limpley Stoke, via Heathrow and JFK. The energy of the group, in our evening gathering was wonderful, and combined with the gentle sea breeze blowing in from Long Island Sound, it erased any sense of fatigue. When I turned in that night, my intention was to dream for the group for the week of adventures in active dreaming and healing that we would share. This is the dream I caught:

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Keys of the Goddess

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A beautiful dark-haired younger woman gives birth to a series of islands. Each is the size of a hamlet, with a single road running through the middle and green hills and sandy beaches on either side. The roads may join up, forming a causeway through this little archipelago.
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This woman fills me with joy and love. My perspective shifts back and forth. I sit talking with her, lightly stroking her hands. There is no sexual feeling here. Rather, I am quietly supporting her, encouraging her to continue the birthing. From time to time, I swoop down in my awareness and examine what is happening in the archipelago that is being born from within her.

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I woke with feelings of pure joy, with a sense of blessing that I had been able to support this birthing.-

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The way the islands popped out reminded me of how new islands pop up in the Pacific, pushed up by volcanic activity, sometimes in lines that follow the pattern of shifting tectonic plates. The road through the dream archipelago also reminded me of the highway that joins the Florida Keys. Yet these, clearly, were not literal islands. -

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I did not recognize the mother of the islands in ordinary life. I reflected that are many women in the group I am leading this week. Some are mothers. Many - and this felt quite significant - do not have children and are unlikely or unable to give birth now in a literal sense. They are all keenly interested in giving birth to new things in their lives in another sense.

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I felt a keen desire to share the abounding energy and joy of this dream with the group. On our first morning together, in view of the gentle waters of the Sound and the lighthouse islands midway in the channel, I recounted the dream and invited the members of our circle to explore it with me, in a group journey powered by drumming.

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In this shared experience of group dream travel, many of our dreamers were seized with the importance of the fact that the new born islands are literally a string of islands. One dreamer saw them as a string of pearls, another as a necklace of the Goddess. In my own reentry, I saw the causeway between the islands as a kind of rope that kept them linked and safely bobbing together. One of the key things I discovered about my dream islands is that when they come out they are floating. They are not yet rooted in the ocean floor and have not yet taken on definitive and individual form. They are in a state of immense creative malleability, offering extraordinary space to those who will claim it.

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In my reentry, the Goddess figure wore a bracelet of Greek keys and a thumb ring bearing the wheat sheaf of Demeter, the great, ever-abundant, Earth Mother. I thought of the Greek myth of the birth of Apollo and Artemis. They were born on a floating island (Delos); only after their delivery was the island rooted in the sea bed. I once wrote a poem "Birth of Apollo" that begins:

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I cannot be born on solid ground
Only where everything flows

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Surely this is a condition for high creativity - to be able to risk floating out, without stable anchorage, into an unknown sea. Yet in our group dreaming we found that there was strength and buoyancy in the "string" that joins the floating islands, which for some of our voyagers expanded into a web of islands stretching far in all directions. Perhaps this is a service we can rendeer for each other, wherever we are willing to support each other's creative growth and dreams of life: to provide the web of connection that helps everyone to stay afloat as we venture further beyond the maps, across the unknown sea.