Walking Wounds
/Last night, I dreamed I was a war veteran, dragging my crippled body forward, scarred and wounded. I found my way to an alley, a safe zone in the battlefield of life. Lying on the ground, head propped against the wall behind me, I watched, in horror, as my scars festered, bubbled up, and then transformed into caterpillars. I wanted to shake them off, frantically, and run away from this nightmare. But I was immobile.
I watched them rise up from my skin and begin to crawl, their tiny feet leaving a trail of tingles. I became fascinated by their colors: deep brown, navy blue, moon yellow, and sunset orange; and by their fur standing up like tiny spikes on their rubber bodies. I watched the slow, sensuous undulation of their march, lifting, lengthening, landing forward, the body becoming the arc of a wave.
One caught my eye, lifting its tiny head and turning towards me. I was expecting it to speak, to share some deep truth that would make sense of this gathering. No words were exchanged, but I felt it's gratitude. It struck me then, that they had eaten my wounds. Now, they were carting off these old hurts I had stored in my body. There were hundreds of them slowly descending to the earth, and I felt elated at their freedom. I looked out, all around me, the ground had turned into shifting waves of color. I knew then that I was dreaming, but I did not wake up. Instead, the dream woke up in me...
The mind works in mysterious ways and healing can take many forms. For me, I use inner work and the content of imagination to dialogue with myself, access the wisdom within, and create new possibilities. This dream came to me after months of struggling with back pain from scoliosis and a spine twisted into a corkscrew.
A while back, I started a dialogue with "Lobac," (a name that actually came as an autocorrect when dictating "low back" into evernote). He is a crippled man living in an alley, which was the image that came to me when I first initiated the dialogue. The work has evolved into "Nobody's Story:" a collection of rather violent and touching stories that he tells me about life in the "Redemption Alley." Until this dream, the point of view had been as if I was talking with this man, hearing his stories. This was the first image from his point of point of view and my first real insight into "his" inner world.
