Chicana Dreamer

For a few hours a day, I get to spend my time with children with disabilities. During that time the day revolves around their schedules in school, science, math, P.E., etc. Simultaneously, there is the element of assisting the children complete their tasks and interact with others appropriately. The adults in charge expend most of their energy guiding the children through the process of learning how to conduct their days in the various situations and get along with other children. However, as easy as this may sound, there is a fine art to getting children to do what is expected of them and still enable them to glean from the experience the lesson that’s presented. Bringing a child to understanding is a very slow process because they have their own ideas–their own paradigm for looking at the world.

When it comes to dreaming and the Old Paradigm, there isn’t much difference between the adults and the children. It’s hard to let go of preconceived notions about reality.

So, what is self-will? In a child self-will is sometimes tolerable to adults. A child needs to learn to share, get along with others, and to listen. But, as I look around the adults, they’re still saying, “This is mine. This is mine, and this is mine.” They often don’t know how to step back and observe. They don’t often share. And, very frequently, they have to win.

What is surrender? Usually, life itself teaches us how to surrender. Losing a loved one takes away the other half of the clapping hand. There’s nothing there to lean on. Careers have been wonderful teachers lately. We lose a job, and suddenly we are stripped of title and buying power, and, occasionally, even shelter. In that void, we free-fall, and, hopefully, call out for The Mother, The Father. Here enters Duality and Surrender/Transcendence.

12-23-10 – Dream

I’m at a park/like community, and I decide that we will have a potluck dinner. People immediately begin to arrive with an abundance of food. I’ve reserved a bar-b-q pit for the occasion, and there are men standing around the pit cooking the meat. A woman is demonstrating how she will display the dish she has brought, and she’s like a Martha Stewart moving her hands over the top of her casserole. Automatically, the arrangement of the casserole changes and looks very attractive with ripples of cream in the bowl. She repeats the motion of her hands and again, the food is neatly arranged in the bowl. It looks so easy, but is it?

A woman arrives with a pile of blankets for people to sit on the floor. There seems to be so much ease in meeting the needs of the guests. I see a woman leaving with blankets and sleeping bags, and I ask her if they are hers. I see she’s Asian or Hawaiian, and immediately, I decide that it’s inappropriate of me to be asking such a question. I let her know she needs not answer and that I don’t need to know. I am amazed at how quickly and easily the gathering came together. The abundance was just astonishing.

Notes:

Everything seemed so easy in the dream. Food appeared effortlessly, blankets, comfort appeared out of nowhere. So, if I translate the “east” into my waking state, It’s the ease in which I am playing the piano, and trust that my fingers will automatically go where they need to go. Let go and move on.

The same is true with my writing. It seems to me we need truth in the material plane as well as the spiritual. Judging by the program When Worlds Collide, mentioned in my last entry (Who’s In Charge?) we need to know the truth in all worlds. Know which world you are in. What your beliefs are, and what you are willing to rely on. The Ancient Ones were right on target. Keep digging into your dreams to find the truth. Remember who you are and live from those memories of the culture. Truth lives in the stories you’ve heard from the Ancient Ones. The Old, Old Creation Stories La Virgen, Quetzalcoatl, She Who Made the Stars. Look for Magic; Look for Light; Listen for Music in your dreams and Dance. Truth is hidden in the spaces of breath, silence and beauty. It yearns to be in relationship with You.

Sweet Dreams,
Ellie

It’s early in the morning, and I’ve awakened with a quiet feeling of peace–aleluya, hermana/o–. I attribute this peace to the fact that I’ve returned to my first love, the piano. I’m not working with a teacher yet, but I’m just practicing to pick up speed and let me fingers unthaw after the long silence. It took time, but something in the following entry put together over the summer into my journal opened my eyes to an unsatisfied longing in my heart. It begins with a poem:

“‘Dime La Verdad, Mamá.
Tell Me the Truth

‘Dime la verdad, Mamá. Tell me that you have always loved me. Tell me that your dreams for me extended beyond the river, the mountains, the horizon, the Sun and the stars; that you dreamed for me guidance by flames of alter candles, prayers, and gentle words; that open arms awaited you from your first breath and were then your legacy to me.

‘Tell me that before you were born, your great grandmother had a place set for her at the dinner table, that she was surrounded by lovely flowers and was given the spiritual truths from her grandmothers, and the heartstrings continued forever forward.

‘Tell me that as far back to the beginning of time, you and your grandmothers lives were filled with music, incantations for joy, and love; that the sweet sound of melodic voices singing in celebration awoke you at their births; and that you danced in bright colored costumes with silver and gold chimes, where your dresses flowed gracefully in rhythm to horns, guitars, gourds, rattles, and drums.

‘My dreams tell me I am a stranger at dinner tables where I am hungry, invisible; where I take small morsels, and say little; a shadow that slips through doors unseen; where only at night I dare to speak my thoughts and dance alone under the dark moon.

‘Tell me I was never shipped to places unknown, beyond the warmth of my family, where voices cracked through stunned silence as muffled noises that awakened espiritus malos bad spirits.

‘Tell me I was never scorned; never seen as the wretched forgotten child of a family, la rechazada, who hid behind tattered curtains, denying lies she heard about a bewildered little stranger, her soul longing for comfort, and respite.

Tell me this is someone else’s nightmare; that my life began filled with music, incantations for joy and love; that the sweet sound of melodic voices singing in celebration awoke me at my birth; and that I danced in bright colored costumes with silver and gold chimes that flowed gracefully in rhythm to horns, guitars, gourds, rattles, and drums.’

“As I write this poem, my sadness stems from not having personal experience with cultural traditions that were available generations past, before Mamá as a governess set sail with an American family for the United States, via South America. To my mind, something in her heart shut down then, in 1920, which altered family ties beyond her time. When I think of my mother’s life, I imagine her as a sixteen year packing her suitcase, and not looking back for many years until she could begin to fathom all she’d lost in leaving her pueblo of Rayon, in Southeastern Mexico. With letters from home in hand, I’d observe her sitting quietly at the top of our back door steps looking into an empty lot overgrown with dry weeds. Sighing pensively, she’d return to her chores with an air of resignation.

“In some way, I carry her unspoken sadness, and long to recreate at least a small fragment of the spiritual truths she left behind. I often feel that I am living out a part of her appointment with destiny.

“Papá was born in Cananea, Sonora, in 1900, fifty years after El Norte was lopped off from Mexico. From his accounts, it seems to me that in the hearts of the people at that time El Rio Bravo still roared its usual song and remained a channel that carried the old ways. In 1918, he arrived in Los Angeles with his guitar and mandolin; they were his love, and his passion. It’s as though he carried his destiny firmly in hand, and whatever twists fate had in store for him, he was prepared to face them.

“I now often wonder if it was my destiny to have this bittersweet, indefinable ache that relentlessly pushes me to scrap together what was “lost,” in my parents’ move North. Before poverty turned our family upside down, and I was sent away to other families while Mamá’s worked in a bracero camp, her dream for me was that people could say “Que bonito Noni toca el piano.” How beautifully Noni plays the piano. As I came into my teens, it was enough for me to know this was what she wanted, to make me fly in the opposite direction. And that was how I missed out on the best of my childhood years; because I felt rejected, I then rejected everything I loved. I do wonder if life would have been sweeter and more accommodating had I bowed to the call of the piano that I loved so much. (my emphasis).”

It is “bowing” to this call that brings me so much joy. I wonder if there is a secret place in your heart that needs to be honored? Today’s the Virgen de Guadalupe’s birthday, another reason to honor what’s in your heart. It does bring peace

Blessings,
Ellie