May 19, 2023

Today is the Black Moon, the second new moon of the month and the third of four in a season, which is an event that only occurs every 33 months. It is a special gift in that new moons are fertile times for intentions and beginnings, planting seeds for the coming cycle, and this one seems to carry a particular quiet potency.

As reticent as I have been to emerge from the cave, the Black Moon seemed to beckon me, like a soft wink from the Goddess herself, inviting me into velvet, starlit night, ensuring my safety under the cover of her darkness. It was an invitation to trust in the intuitive nudge, though it is also backed by an immense and constant pressure to come forward, one I have been sitting on and resisting for months.

But the third and final signal, and what really instilled in me the courage to act, was simple yet totally remarkable.

I recently had the most precious opportunity to spend two weeks with my mother in our new forest-nestled home. The last time I had any extended alone time with her was in early-ish childhood, and it was yet another gift to be in each other’s company, sharing meals and gardening, often wordlessly. One thing that has been truly surprising to learn since my father’s passing, is that she is very much a skeptic ; she simply doesn’t believe her late husband still exists in some way after death, among other “unbelievables.” Maybe this shouldn’t shock me, as I have also been deeply skeptical throughout my life ; it has taken hundreds of unexplainable experiences for the stubbornness in me to give way and surrender itself to a greater, ultimately unknowable felt understanding. But the reason it still surprises me is because for all of her life, my mother has been a highly gifted precognitive dreamer : since a young age, she has been able to see future events in her dreamscape before they occur.

Upon arriving back in her Los Angeles apartment, she says to me, “I feel like I just woke up from a beautiful dream.”

As a child, I had an intensively active and dynamic imaginative, internal world, as many do — and, like for many of us, access to that world has been whittled away and obscured by conventional structures, social pressures, shoulds and shouldn’ts, categorizations of what is sensible and what is deviant, cropping up like urban scapes on wild land : a domestication of the mind and of individual and collective life. What I realize now is that this journey of mine, of healing, recapitulation, spiritual re-minding and re-membering, spreading now well into its second decade, has been about reclaiming the instinctual self and the capacity to feel and to Dream.

When I stumble into this realm through practice or sudden realizations during contemplation, I find that it all remains underneath those conditioned structures . . . and the more presence I cultivate, the more I can sustain this awareness, I naturally “tap in” and reconnect with the ever-so-fertile soil and mystical dark sea of the Void.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, there has been a more subdued and longstanding pandemic in the modern world of having forgotten, suppressed, rejected this quality of relating.

I see it in the way we shake our fists at what is broken, in how depressed and disappointed we are — not just that we are collectively suffering and disillusioned, but we feel let down or even betrayed by life, by systems, because in the backs of our minds, in the depths of our hearts and in the cells of our bodies, we sense what Life could be.

We sense that we are missing something, but we don’t know what it is.

Of course, the wise and knowing have many names for it, and of course, it is not really an “it”, nor is it actually knowable or nameable. What is known is there is some”thing”, some “-ness”, that gives rise to all that exists, and it is what many of us have forgotten how to relate to. The Void, The Source, The Great Mystery, The Dao that Cannot Be Spoken. Physicists have come to understand it as quantum potential. And yet another name for it is :

The Dreaming.

Aboriginal elders speak of the Dreaming like the dark side of the moon, though we cannot fully see it, there are times in relation to the light, visible side of the moon, we can see the shadowy face glimmering. But we focus on the bright visible face and call it the Moon, but without its dark other side, it is not a complete understanding. So too is our singular focus on the visible, material world ; without acknowledging the invisible quantum potent-ial force / field / energy / quality / “-ness” underpinning all that exists, we are functioning in a limited way, very much cutting ourselves off from what wise ones consider true Reality, and therein rejecting half of our own selves.

Believe it or not, we are part of a collective dream. We are the dreams of our ancestors. Our capacity to Dream restores us to our place among all that is and allows us to imagine, co-create and contribute to greater harmony.

Dreaming is not a fleeting, whimsical dalliance, though it can have those qualities sometimes. As much as I was a dreamer as a child, I was also contemplative and serious, and this latter part of me won over in ways that had me overlooking that which has been right in front, patiently waiting. To Dream is to anticipate potential and to go on to realize it in the world. To recover this instinct and to enact this intelligence successfully and consistently, to manifest meaningful change in our lives, requires what I among many lovingly refer to as the “Work” — self reflection, investigation, diving in, feeling through, carefully reclaiming our disowned parts, rejecting none ; honoring and healing our bodies, moving through layers of labyrinth and gradually integrating our whole selves with abundant doses of courage and willingness.

Though this way isn’t for everyone, anyone can heed the call.

I humbly believe this kind of work is the one of the most important and sacred tasks we can endeavor upon. We comprise the very world at which we shake our weary fists, but really, these turbulent times herald great change, an initiation into our sovereign and collective spiritual adulthood. We are the germinating seeds of the more harmonious future we wish for our children, just as they themselves are. We fertilize the soil of Reality with our dreams and our actions.

We have more agency and power in co-creating our reality than we are led to believe. The time is ripe, and The Dreaming beckons.

My hope is that I will have the opportunity to work with some of those who feel resonance with this message in whatever capacity, and at the very least, that it has provided some reflection on what may feel like a dark night. Thank you for reading.

With love and gratitude,

Jennifer