I felt that I went down into a huge cleft that lay beneath the creek that ran beside the cabin I lived in. I was unafraid but did not complete the journey and expected to return in a later dream.

There was much to the experience with this land, with this dream, and the many hard lessons that came to me there. It was certainly an experience of living in several dimensions as you describe in your post here. It is hard to articulate well.

I lost that beloved land and dream in a divorce. It is interesting to me that the dream began for me in 2000 and ended in 2007, which are the years you mention above. This may mean nothing or everything. How can any of us know?

When I came across the poem below, I felt that it described the anguish of that loss well …

DIVING by Jessica Penrose
 
You may feel me as a ripple beneath your feet,
a tremor, a parting of grass stalks
that shiver and return to stillness.
 
I’m swimming just below the surface,
sweeping back armfuls of tree roots
and animal bones in my wake.
 
The crown of my head is an earth mover.
My hands slice through clay
legs kick out at rock and feel it crumble.
 
The woman’s body that walks beside you
is empty – do not reach out to it.
Her soul is in my mouth, and swimming with me.

Published in the Rialto, a UK poetry magazine

As you will see it has both the earth and water imagery in it that is so significant for me – and apparently for you! A friend wrote this to me when I shared the poem with him (Dec. 07):

‘I can easily see the woman in the poem as one who has somehow transmuted her anger through her relationship to the earth to become a source of power, unstoppable, primal, inviolable.  This is the anger of Persephone at being raped transmuted into the power of the Queen of the Underworld.  Somehow I think this is also what you are trying to do.’

And have been ever since. These are the myths, the shadow stories, that we are perhaps being called to face now.

If for no other reason than to help me understand that this incredibly intense crumbling process is freeing me from a type of prison. WHAT A STATEMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!

THANK YOU!!!! I needed that in the worst way.

LOVE,