I am in an insane asylum. It is large and labyrinthine with many hallways and rooms and rooms within rooms.
It seems I am a doctor of sorts, a healer.
There are many sweet sweet patients – interesting artists and creative types – lovely people.
But there are also many angry people walking the hallways. Angry men especially.
On closer observation, some of the angriest figures turn out to be animals walking on their hind legs.
There is a lion walking upright in one hallway with a sign around his neck, “You will die if you get too close”. It’s difficult to figure out how to manoeuvre within this dangerous place.
One room is a large blue-hued glowing-glass high-tech sci-fi X-ray kinda room.
A young man is in there – he is my patient. His head sits above what is like a skin sack – a shapeless sheet of a body.
I tell him to remember to feel his bones.
Feel the bones – remember the feeling of bones.
As I speak, his bones are wheeled in from where they’ve been kept in storage.
His whole skeleton will be reassembled. But while this is happening, the angry people and animals in the hallways are becoming more agitated – it is getting increasingly violent and dangerous.
I run through hallways and through rooms into even tinier rooms until I find mine, a small, well-hidden room where I dive under the cot bed against the wall, trembling like a coward, to wait out the violence.
Am I perhaps a patient after all?
She turned to me, her blue eyes faintly distant, mysterious and said: I had a dream of a fox. But when I asked the fox what he wanted, he said:
I am here for Kat. I have a message for Kat.
We were sitting at the breakfast table, the three of us. A few days together and we’d taken up the habit of sharing dreams while we figured out coffee and food, it feeling a natural, rich way to begin the day. But this was different – this was A Message. And the thing was – I hadn’t even told them the story about the fox.
There’d been too much going on – there was that crazy night in Barrie with the lousy car, being saved by our angel Hedy, then appeasing the Goddesses of crossroads out by the car rental joint on the highway and the drive to our place, and days with the urgency to get outside, get hot and get in the water and swim, have a real summer, make great food, drink wine and sit in the dark on the porch looking at stars and watching the bats dive for bugs.
So I hadn’t told them the story of the fox. I mean I’d told them about the place I’d been the weekend before – about the little cabins in the woods, the amazing locally-sourced food, the moon rising over the lake, and singing in the dark of the sauna and diving in the cold night lake, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, camp songs and show songs and snippets of Tragically Hip songs, all of us trying to remember the words cause it was the night of their final concert and all of Canada was said to be tuning in.
Courage, my word It didn’t come, it doesn’t matter Courage, your word It didn’t come, it doesn’t matter Courage, my word It didn’t come, it doesn’t matter Courage, it couldn’t come at a worse time
The people were wonderful and strange: the core co-facilitators of the shamanic circle, a bunch of us newbies from various Ontario towns, and a young, fascinating First Nations fellow who, despite his youth, brought what felt like lifetimes of ceremonial experience. It was the Saturday morning when I overheard him talking to my cabin-mate about a fox. Apparently on her drive up she’d gotten lost and ended up wandering on some back road where she saw a dead fox. For some reason she couldn’t explain, she stopped the car and gathered up the fox and brought it with her. “I mean I don’t make a habit of picking up roadkill”, she said, still mystified. That afternoon, the First Nations fellow led us in a ceremony to reactivate a labyrinth on the land, using a massive quartz crystal, tobacco leaves, water from lake Atitlan, and fur from the tip of the dead fox’s tail. Most of the group circled into the center of the labyrinth, but 4 of us stood menhir-like in the 4 directions. I stood in the West, my eyes closed while we sang as they danced their way to the middle point of the labyrinth to plant tobacco, quartz, water and fox. As I stood, I felt, saw, experienced the entire event as a spinning, galactic vortex of energy churning up and out into the sky – it felt so powerful, so forceful, I felt I might fall over.
The weekend was full of these kind of Experiences – this one with the fox’s tail at the labyrinth particularly intense. But I hadn’t told my friends all these particulars before that morning at the breakfast table, before my blue-eyed friend said: “I dreamt of a fox and he said he’d come for you”. It all seemed too personal in a way. Or maybe it was that such a powerful internal experience will never really translate into words, words will always seem dry and inadequate. Or maybe I thought even to talk about it would dissipate the power in some way, cause it’ll all just sound hokey. But as the impact of the whole thing began to sink in – that a fox had come to her in a dream to say: “I have a message for Kat” – the three of us looked at each other and wondered… What message? What did the fox want? Why like this? Why not just come to me directly?
While I can’t speak for the fox, while I wonder if there was more to the message I should be able to fathom somehow, I’ve begun to think that the simplicity of his apparition to her was a message in itself. It was a way to really REALLY get my attention. Because it would be so easy for me to say to myself, “Oh, the things I felt that weekend were just my imagination”. Or, “This whole idea of spirits is all very well, but…” Repeatedly I’ve heard various teachers on my path say they’d spent months, even years on the path of shamanism, of ceremony and journeying and so on, but STILL they doubted this whole business of “spirits”… Until something happens that hits them over the head and makes it all so very plain.
Mornings on the patio…
Last year, in the borders out here on the patio, I planted a few tomatoes, some peppers, perennials.
This year, not so much, but our new-ish neighbour to the left, after a few tentative tomatoes last year, suddenly decided to go all in.
She has a much larger section of dirt and less patio, so rows were created in the earth, sections for various kinds of tomatoes, beans, herbs, squash, and the tall corn…
For weeks she’s been out there watering her plants every morning, though when you ask her there is a shrug of doubt – she’s an urban girl from Nigeria, she tells me, and her friends back home tease her that she’s come to Canada to become a farmer.
It’s all so new, she says, she herself doesn’t believe the plants will grow.
June and so far July have been full of long dry sunny days.
Mornings have the rustle of people in pyjamas out watering and tending the flowers, the vegetables – weeks ago the grass dwindled to a shrivelled pale yellow.
But then after so many dry hot days, for a glorious 24 hours it rains…
And the next day I am out again in the morning sun, and am a bit confused at the huge leaves over on the left.
A massive plant has started growing through the fence from my neighbour’s side…
It has already crowded out the little instalments of parsley and coriander I had growing over in that corner.
She comes around to see it – she can’t believe it!
That her gardening has been so successful the plants are bursting through the fence, seeking out more space to blossom and flourish!
I lift up a leaf to show her one squash that’s already an astonishing size.
Her eyes widen – the miracle of it!
She tells me I must use not only what is growing on my side, but help myself to her side as well, as she has more vegetables than she knows what to do with. That I must show her how I cook it, as she doesn’t even know anything about this kind of squash.
So, practicing my recipes, this morning for breakfast, I had flor de calabaza with salsa verde… yummmm…
I am in an insane asylum. It is large and labyrinthine with many hallways and rooms and rooms within rooms.
It’s difficult to figure out how to manoeuvre within this dangerous place.
But while this is happening, the angry people and animals in the hallways are becoming more agitated – it is getting increasingly violent and dangerous.
follow your nose 