TreasureDreamWisdom

I just finished Prentis Hemphill’s gorgeous offering, What it Takes to Heal, and I was so moved that I sat down at my computer for the first time in more than 6 months and made room for a contemplation to emerge from the residue of this book which read me like a Priest sitting on a mat with her divining tools. As this experience continues to metabolize, I’m sitting with a feeling of profound gratitude for the language they offer to accompany my experience of this lifetime. The language situates itself between the pragmatism of personal interrogation and the deep call to collective world-building. It gives me space to consider my own deeply interior experience and expand it to meet the collective need we are experiencing on our planet in this moment of now.

I am always reminded that every marker of evolution first began as a vision. Indigenous communities have long pioneered the use of liminal intelligence inherent in sentient beings and taught us the value of honoring our visions and dreams. Vision quests are seen as a right of passage and sharing, storying, embodying, and ritualizing dreams have long been used to forecast and prophesy. Prentis says visions are rooted in longing; that longing, deeper and different than wanting, may be that thing we desire so deeply but are afraid to say out loud. That longing may in fact be the thing that maps our way forward to the beloved community we aspire to be. Unastonishingly, I have found over these last 25 years that the things we long for and are unafraid to acknowledge in waking life will bleed through our dreams. This, of course, is nothing groundbreaking. Many of us have been introduced to Freud’s theory of dreams as being “wish fulfillment” – like the recurring dream I once had of tons of beautifully baked, delicious bread after I decided in my waking life to stop eating wheat. But sometimes what we long for feels so big and transformational that we can’t even name it. Sometimes it is love beckoning us to grow and change- like a longing to give birth. We feel those contractions and our first instinct is to resist/run/deny -so our dreams come to the rescue and give us space to work it out in our subconscious.

“To vision futures is to conjure something that sits outside of your time and circumstance…what we allow ourselves to imagine, what dreams spring from unlikely relationships, is the beginning of the future”.- Prentis Hemphill, What it Takes to Heal

Visioning can be equal parts willful and beyond our consent; focused attention and the liminal space between being awake and asleep. Neither is to be discounted because they emerge from the same place. The seat of our imagination is also the place where we dream. And both can and do seed transformation. What we do with those dream treasures is up to us. It is my prayer that we each move a little closer to our dreams with curiosity and wonder, and use them as markers on the way to a transformed society.