The Alchemy of Revelations through our Dreams
The avenue where I found a direct path to the realm of the creative matrix of the great Mother Goddess is through the alchemy of my dreams. As we descend inwardly into the unconscious layers beneath our usual mind activity the Goddess appears in many forms and shapes taking us to the deepest transformative embodiment of her own nature. I do not have the words to explain this amazing journey as only through experiencing it for oneself can this process be understood completely. But the archetypal forces that come to us in our dreams can reveal the rich, rebirthing capacity that is totally accessible to each of us. The dream world is the ground upon which everything transformative may happen and actually everything does happen.
I had a dream around twenty-five years ago, while living in Nashville, when I was deeply engaged in my own inner journey. I had been working with dreams and art. In this particular dream I saw the image of a heart with a very small cross underneath it and I heard a disembodied voice say to me, “In the future the heart will become more important than the cross, and the cross will be much smaller supporting the heart underneath.” The voice continued, “You need to wear this symbol on the left arm for your protection and that this was La Santisima, Most Holy.”
The dream was surprising and even shocking to me and as I began working with its symbolical meaning it became clear that it contained a very important message and that I needed to act promptly to create a piece of art work that could embody the energy of the dream. This is the painting that emerged.
Along with the painting I felt compelled, as instructed in the dream, to somehow display the symbol on my left side, but to protect me from what? And to protect what? I became aware that the left side of the body is coordinated by the right side of the brain, performing tasks that have to do with creativity, artistic awareness, imagination, intuition, insights, holistic thought, music awareness and three-dimensional forms all characteristics of the feminine nature. I realized that my artistic creative work was challenged in many ways and that I needed to protect my work in the community of supporting women in their creative endeavors, and nurturing them in their dreams, rituals and ceremonies. This was the time in my life where my most important commitment was to feminism and activism for reclaiming the sacredness of the feminine.
There were people (in this Bible-belt part of the country) who were not happy or excited about what I was doing, my work was challenging and misunderstood by people in power and by a sector of the media. There were a couple of newspaper articles questioning my feminist tendencies as an obsolete endeavor. Until that moment I didn’t see my work as something that would be attacked simply because I was addressing women issues and supporting women’s creative and spiritual manifestations. The articles really caught my attention.
In 1991 before this dream I created the non-profit organization Women on the Inner Journey Foundation for building bridges racially and culturally though art and spirituality, to educate the community about women’s unique spiritual life. A spirituality not confined to a church service but existing everywhere from home altars to rituals and ceremonies in the woods.
Part of the Foundation’s early work was the creation of public art displays. Our first exhibit, Reaching the Spirit, was a collection of eighteen altars from different spiritual traditions and orientations ranging from Catholic to Wicca and Native American and more, each unique altar created by an African-American or Anglo woman from the Nashville area. Some of the women participating felt that they were coming out of the closet in such a way that they were concerned that the whole community might condemn, demonize, and even accuse them of witchcraft. This fear surprised me as I viewed the exhibit merely as a natural celebration of women spirituality that needed to be shared to educate the community. The image of freedom and an avant-garde culture that I had of the United States began to be undermined.
Despite the negative articles and the concern of some of the artists, I felt that we were ready to take on the risk. If we didn’t do it then, when this feminine energy in Nashville was bubbling up below the surface, then when? It was at this point when I became aware that this was the work I had come to this country to do, bringing with me a heritage (that I wasn’t conscious of it until that moment) of a spiritual foundation rooted in women’s altars as a manifestation of the embodiment of sacredness. What could be more important than this?
I choose the name Reaching the Spirit for the exhibit because it had now become apparent that in this culture women had been denied of their spiritual capacity to embody sacredness and create sacred spaces publicly. In the woods surrounding Nashville away from public view, however, I had found diverse groups of ordinary women exercising their own unique capacity to be in sync with nature and with life itself unfolding as a spiritual practice. Every altar revealed the spiritual depth of each one of these women and their capacity to bring a unique energy of nurturing while embracing their individual diversity.
During the opening night before the public was scheduled to arrive we all gathered in a circle with the clear commitment to stand by our altars as sacred spaces where everyone could be nurtured, get drunk by the beauty and rejoice in a deep embrace. To our extraordinary surprise the gallery was packed with a constant stream of people for over four hours. The owners of the others galleries around the area came rushing to our gallery to experience for themselves what they heard people saying about our exhibit with its amazing creativity and unique energy. During the entire month of the exhibit we saw many parents coming with their children to expose them to a new experience, an expression of a spiritual life created and shared by women.
Energetically, yes, protection was needed for this emergence of new, free and vulnerable feminine energy. As I worked with the heart and cross painting what came clear was that the glowing heart needed to be embraced and protected by the hands of the Mother, the Goddess, La Santisima!
(To be continued)
[This was first published in She Rises: What… Goddess Feminism, Actvism and Spirituality? Volume 3]
(Meet Mago Contributor) Noris Binet.