☕ saturday mornings - july 29, 2023

dragons, encouragement & dreams

Happy Saturday!

I hope you’re having a great start to your weekend.

What I’ve been up to:

• I was sick for a bit. It felt like I temporarily inhabited the body of an 85 year old man. But I'm beginning to feel better.

• I've spent a few days at a good friend's cottage in Muskoka, Ontario. 

• One morning, I saw a black bear on my run. Up close, across the road, peeking out of the woods, looking right at me. I was stunned. But also appreciative that I can run somewhere black bears still live.

As always, here's an inside look at the most interesting ideas I've explored this week.

Enjoy.

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✍️ quote i’m pondering:

Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke on fear as signal:

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

American writer Joseph Campbell echoes a similar idea:

"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek."

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📚 book passage i loved:

“One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement.

When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold you might otherwise never have crossed on your own.”

― Eternal Echoes by John O'Donohue

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💡 idea from me: on dreams

The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich (1818)

I keep having this dream where I’m in some bustling bright city.

I'm trying to find my way back to my hotel or apartment. I can't tell which. I walk down a street but I realize I’m lost. Without direction. I'm not able to find my way home. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know where I am. Often, I realize I've walked in the opposite direction. I have to start the long way back.

Then I wake up.

I've been writing down my dreams for the past few months. On and off. But I'm beginning to learn how they are laced with meaning. How my dreams reveal my relationship with myself: my fears, my desires, my self-image.

Many disregard dreams as trivial, silly, meaningless. But the symbols and stories that appear come from somewhere in my mind, for some reason. It’s not random.

Joseph Campbell (influenced by Freud and Jung) believed dreams are a portal to the unconscious. A canvas for the subconscious mind to project itself.

It's not always easy. My dreams dredge up the parts of myself and the parts of my life that I don't want to see into the light of consciousness.

Jung called it the shadow: the portion of our personality that is banished to the unconscious. The shadow isn't always what is evil, but what is hidden or ignored (from yourself and the world).

By facing our shadow and figuring out what dwells there, we become less susceptible to it. As Jung said, “A small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed… the most terrifying thing in the world is to accept oneself completely.”

To protect yourself from evil, you must understand it.

It's the same reason Harry Potter (with his forehead scar from Voldemort) and Frodo (with his Ringwraith wound) have a heightened sensitivity to and ability to ward off evil. They've been touched by evil—it left its mark on them. They know exactly what evil feels like.

The virtuous person isn't someone who is empty of evil, but someone who confronts and controls the evil within them.

It's also why Jordan Peterson's future authoring program has you describe the future you want to avoid:

Consider the multitude of your faults and the direction those faults could pull you in. Everyone has a sense of how they would fall apart in their own particular manner with their own particular weaknesses.

It's three to five years down the road and you let that part of your character dominate. What particular corner of hell are you now occupying?

Everyone has a sense of how we could blow up our lives if we succumb to temptation, if we aim down, if we bend to that which is evil within us.

I've written before about not becoming bitter. I can envision a path where I do. But by being consciously aware of exactly how my life could fall apart, I'm better equipped to avoid it. I know the pitfalls.

And because our shadow exists in the unconscious, dreams are one of the best ways to engage it.

Kristen Poeshn writes:

Simply writing down a tough dream, or sitting with the difficult emotions they brought up felt agonizing at best. But I’ve learned over the years that if I’m willing to meet the patterns coming up in my dreams, they’re much less likely to rollercoaster their way through my waking life.

The Sufi saint Radha Mohan Lal Ji once said, “One second of suffering in dreams is equal to years of suffering in waking life."

I'm not great with navigation (those who know me will be grinning) but I don't think that's what my dream is telling me. I think my dream is telling me that I lack clarity. Direction. I'm not clear on what I want and where I'm headed.

I'm kinda aware of it. But it's not something I like to think about. I tend to keep it in my brain’s peripheral vision. But noticing and journaling on these dreams has forced me to confront the pain of feeling a little lost in my conscious life.

And not all dreams are heavy.

Sometimes dreams reveal shadows, but sometimes they radiate light.

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❓ question i’m asking:

If someone took control of your life tomorrow, what’s the first thing they would change?

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📸 photo of the week:

Black Oaks by Mary Oliver

I guess I mostly take photos of poems these days…

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With love,

Tommy