healing fire dream

It's a long, weary journey back home. Nearly uncrossable, this vast empty in-between wildness. All day I battle unseen forces for my painfully slow northward progress. The road's never been so steep and so uphill as it is on this trip. At times it fades off into a narrow, barely visible track, and those of us who accumulate there need a guide to get across. Other times it fades away altogether, and we go jarring over the earth's bare bones, teeth gritted with apologies and impatience and dust.

At last I reach my destination, but there's still so much work to do. So many people are waiting for the sustenance only I can bring them. I drain myself to the dregs of strength and of determination. I can't slow this frantic motion: it's written into the internal program now. My body runs by itself on gasoline fumes and exhausted, essential momentum. Just when the muscles are making their last desperate, shaky demands - stop now or we'll stop you - it's over. The deep quiet sweeps in again like the ocean, covering all.

My companion sends me a message, from the other side of the chaos: I'm with friends...it's peaceful...you can join us here. Winding through the cold night I fight off nagging negativity: I'm too depleted for people, even friendly ones. I have nothing left to give. But he meets me at the pavement's edge with a brilliant and peaceful smile, and now there are stars glimmering overhead, lighting up the dark. "This way," he says, and suddenly we're at the entrance of not a noisy house but a giant teepee, which glows golden from a fire burning inside. I climb through a doorway that is really much smaller than I can fit through, into a room that is much larger inside than out. In this round space a single young man sits crosslegged. His long dreds are the same color as the fire, and he radiates the same peaceful, unobtrusive warmth. My companion introduces him: he has the same name as that last one who broke my heart. It was two years back but the syllables still shake me for half a moment. Then I see clearer, and realize that this person tending the fire is the essential opposite of that hurtful one. Expression as kind and open as his was searching, cutting, critical. Energy as engaging as his was about separation. We're not in that dimension anymore. Ever.

And then there is my companion, sitting next to me now, absorbing the fire's quiet luminescence into his own. Casting welcome, kindness, and affirmation around me like a fine blanket, hand-woven out of beams of light. His presence is the essential opposite of years of futile, unfocused journeys alone. We have been travelling together for a while, it seems. Weeks, months, more? And following many of the same roads, in parallel planes if not together. Already he knows me - from deep listening, from patient seeing, and quite possibly from reading my mind, if not my soul as well. I am only here, now. There is nothing to fear and nothing to be wearied by, in this place. The flames lap softly at little wood fragments, drinking the energies of trees that once stood in silent celebration, in shadowy forests which my path once wound its way through. They give back just a taste, just a sweet breath of what it is to be one with all that grows and breathes on the earth. Time stops - or, there is no more need for time - or, maybe there never was time. Only now, only the kindness of this stillmoving golden light.

And the most beautiful part of this dream: it all really happened...