I think wondering if we are on the right path is something we all struggle with. We want our lives to have purpose, to have a deeper meaning than just having a roof over our heads and food on the table.
My identity and wanting to feel a sense of ease in my place in this world is something I come back to again and again. Existentially, I create my own struggle and assign my own meaning.
In my dreams I feel like I am closest to understanding who I am and what I should be doing.
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As I emerge into the open, after my long, long walk down the descending spiral stairs, she is waiting for me. Most often she wears the guise of the crow, all bird, but the Queen of Crows is a shapeshifter. She may appear as she pleases.
Strangely, I've only just made the connection between the crow that habitually meets me in this dream landscape and the shapeshifting Morrigan even though we've met down here so many times before. She's introduced herself to me as both the Crone and as the Queen of Bones, but I never made the necessary mental leap.
In her Always Cottage, deep in the forest, I've spent hours with the Crone. I've sat by her hearth, even helped her work on the stew that always seems to be simmering on the cauldron in the fireplace, but I never put it all together.
Tonight, we aren't going deep into the forest toward the Cottage. She's not in the guise of the Crone. Tonight, she's all dark goddess. Tonight feels more purposeful.
I follow her into the woods and then into the caves. We go deep into the womb of the earth, into the cold and the quiet. There's something she wants to show me.
After what feels like a very long journey, so much dark and so much quiet, we emerge into a larger space. She shows me the wall, indicating what she needed me to see: Cave paintings. The wall is covered in cave paintings; primitive, early paintings of animals: horses, bison. This is where everything began tens of thousands of years ago.
Anthropologists seem to assign the beginning of civilization to the 4th millenium BC. Cave painting started over 30,000 years ago. How do you define what is civilization?
Is there where civilization truly began? When we began to recognize ourselves as spiritual beings? When we asked permission of the spirit of the horse and of the bison to seek them as food? When we asked for permission to take their life force to nourish our own?
This is the place where spirituality and art met, maybe for the first time, or maybe just the first time that we left a record of it for our descendents to find tens of thousands of years hence. No doubt we've been drawing in lines in the sand for millenium before we ever thought to take color and trace the outline of a beast on a cave wall. Art and spirit. The spirituality of art.
She hands me the pot of color. There is where I am meant to be.