Who knows what’s behind the door? – Art by Jan Ketchel
I dreamed last night. In the dream I was waiting for something to arrive, a delivery was going to be made. Suddenly I heard loud knocks on the front door, two vigorous raps as loud as gunshots followed by two more, equally loud. When I heard the first two knocks I imagined that it was the delivery that I was awaiting, but as I heard the second two I woke up, sure that it meant something else.
I lay awake in bed wondering if someone was indeed outside the front door in the middle of the night. I waited to hear more rapping but none followed.
As I dozed off again I remembered that loud knocks in dreaming are often an indication of spirit calling, such knocks the precursor to going out of body. I also sensed that the dream was a premonition of something to come, that some news would come in this manner.
I acknowledge that my spirit is preparing me for something. Perhaps it’s asking me to allow myself to go out of body, to not get startled by the knocks in the night but to allow them to take me to a higher level of dreaming. Perhaps it’s letting me know that change is coming, or that I will be startled by the arrival of something, expected but unexpected as well, for the loudness of the knocks was startling.
I’m not too concerned. I refuse to let myself worry over something that is only fiction at this point. Instead I’m determined to let life unfold as it will, for I know I have no control over what happens, in fact I believe that it’s wrong to interfere with life’s unfolding. I am, however, focused on maintaining my awareness of this dream message, for I believe it is a message. It might not be at all what I think though, and so I am open to what unfolds over the next few days and weeks.
I have had premonitions many times before in dreams, things that eventually unfolded just as I had dreamed. Sometimes our dream messages are very specific and sometimes they are metaphorical. It’s hard to know which they are until life’s unfolding shows us the answer.
Spirit asks us to emerge and finally live this time around… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Training our awareness, reminding ourselves to remember and to document our experiences, is a good way to connect our dreaming experiences with our living reality. They are connected, but we only realize this as we dare to ask ourselves to remember and stay alert, to value our dreaming experiences, allowing them to enhance our waking experiences.
In the end, I choose to take my dreaming experience as true on all levels. Yes, it’s a premonition, but it’s also a call from my spirit because I know that my spirit is always calling. It called me to do my recapitulation, and it continues to challenge me to be fully present and aware, whether I’m dreaming or awake.
I seek to achieve balance, all the time… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
As an artist and writer I fully experience my creativity. When I am creating something I am totally focused on what I am doing; I am in the zone. Everything else slips away and life is just me and what I am working on. Creative energy runs through me and I willingly go along for the ride.
I have a deep need for creative perfection, but I’ve also learned over the years to recognize when a piece is done, to instinctively know when it’s time to stop, to put down my tools and release myself from the creative surge and to also let go of my attachment to the work I have done. There is deep satisfaction in both the creative time and the release from it; there is balance.
I recently listened to a segment of The Moth in which a New York Times reporter ventured to Afghanistan after the ouster of the Taliban in 2001. He went in search of art. All forms of art had been banned while the Taliban ruled, everything from painting to poetry and music. For five years no one was allowed to produce art, to sing, to act, or even own a musical instrument; to do so would have meant arrest or even death.
By a series of synchronistic events the reporter met a man who was painting miniatures in the traditional style. He asked him why he wasn’t painting something new, expressing the energy of now and the future that was looming before him and his people. The artist told the reporter that he could not paint the future until he had completed the past, that his people were not free to move forward if they did not fully know their past. It struck me. The artist knew the value of recapitulation; only in fully knowing where he had been could he go forward with any sense of release or contentment. He knew he had to recreate what had been, as perfectly as possible, but he also knew that a time would arrive when he would leave the past and move on.
I have recently been pondering my own process of creativity. I notice how that need for perfection is so honed that it takes over. I become totally focused on what I am doing and often the rest of my life goes unattended. I do the minimum, but only what absolutely needs doing. I am often reluctant to stop at the end of the day, to have anything interfere. There have been times in my life when I was able to totally live the creative life, but as much as I loved it I now know that it was a life out of balance.
Needling thoughts that I must attend to the piles of clutter, to the unattended that gets forgotten after a while, had been stirring all through the winter months. I’d look around and tell myself that I had to attend to this pile of stuff and that pile of stuff. When I’m done with this, I’d say, when I’m done with that. Now it’s almost summer. I’ve been making inroads into clearing the clutter, into clearing also the energy stuck in that clutter, making a concerted effort to get rid of what I no longer use or need and to organize that which has value so that my life can flow better. My need for perfection is seeping out of the dedicated creative time into all the time now. Life, I have decided, is my new art form.
I still seek a certain kind of perfection, not to be perfect because I know I am not, but to achieve the impeccability that I have mostly assigned to my creative endeavors. Where before I might leave dishes in the sink to do later while I head off to do something creative, I now finish the kitchen clean-up before I turn to something else. I do it with impeccability. I want to walk into a beautiful kitchen later in the day, to feel good in my home, to experience a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that is energetically fulfilling. In so doing I learn the value of completion of one task before beginning a new one. This is what the Afghani artist was telling the reporter; one must fully complete if one is to be fully energetically available for new creative endeavors.
I saw this heart shape in the floor tiles, an almost birdlike and beelike form flying past like freed energy… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
I’ve noticed that even in clearing out my cluttered closet I achieve a sense of renewal. The more I clear, the more space I create, space in which energy can finally flow freely and naturally without obstacles or blockages.
In clearing, I create a new reality for myself, more balanced and in alignment with the energy of the universe. Each time I clear something I feel myself become more energetically alive and available for what life has in store.
Seeking solitude in the midst of life… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
I had dreams when I was young. Those dreams always centered around a contemplative life. My Catholic schoolgirl self envisioned joining a convent, one that fostered a life of silence and prayer. I thought that would be the perfect life.
In my teenage years I contemplated the hermit’s life, living alone in some remote area, far removed from society in search of nirvana. As I grew up, left home and went out into the world, I still wished for and dreamed of retreat, for the safety and freedom of a solitary place where I could just be.
At my core I was always aware that I had such dreams because I was afraid of the world, but little did I know the reason for my fears. I did not know that I had already encountered frightening evil.
Over the past few nights, while dreaming, I have encountered a woman. She confronts me. The first night she sat next to me. She stared at my hands and arms, which I held in my lap. “Why aren’t you wearing any of Jeanne’s jewelry? Why aren’t you wearing anything that belonged to her?” she asked me. “It doesn’t matter,” I said in my usual humble and self-deprecating manner. “I’m not special, and besides anyone can do what I do.”
Last night she came back into my dream. This time I passed by her on a street. “Bitch!” she said to me as she walked quickly past. Behind me I could hear another woman ask her why she had said that to me. “We have to harass her,” she said.
These two dreams make sense to me as I seek balance in my life, as I constantly seek to fully accept and own who I am, all parts of myself. In the first dream the woman was confronting me about my spiritual side and my work as a spiritual being. Am I truly owning her? Do I fully live as the spiritual being I have worked so hard to become, a being with the ability to channel?
In the second dream, the woman is asking me to confront my human self, all the things I have done in this life, all the moods, angers, deceits, and fears that make me human. I must fully embrace and own her too. The woman in my dream asks me to fully express all parts of myself, without holding back, to fully be both the spiritual being that I am and the visceral human, bitch or otherwise, that I am.
The two sides of self must fully live as one… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
And I do need to be harassed. If I am to know who I truly am, I must constantly be confronted, in dreams and in reality. All of this is part of actively living a contemplative life. I already know that if I go too far over to the contemplative side I ignore my human self. If I get too human I ignore my spiritual self. But what I realize, and have for a long time now, is that my dreams of living a contemplative life have always been my reality. I have always been a contemplative person. Most of us are.
I did not go into a convent or retreat to a mountaintop, but I did create my own reality. I did secure myself a life of contemplation in all that I chose to do in life. I was always living my dream. But when we are in the midst of life we might not realize this, though I see how my intentions—what I told myself I wanted—became my life. I lived the solitary life of a freelance artist and writer, not in a convent or a cave on the side of a mountain but sequestered in my studio. I ventured out into the world to deliver one assignment and secure my next, but for the most part I lived in solitude. And I liked it that way.
I also now know that my contemplative life has evolved me forward into something more like my childhood dreams, into a life full of opportunities to experience the purity and freedom to just be; what was always at the root of my desire for retreat. But I had to go through the trials of recapitulation to get here, like the confrontations with the dark side of the soul that all contemplatives must face if they are to evolve into the spiritual beings they dream of becoming too.
At this point in my life, as I look back on the journey I’ve taken, I see the bigger picture now, but we have the opportunity to do this all the time, to pause and contemplate where we have been. We always have the opportunity to ask: What are the messages I’m giving myself? What reality do I want to create for myself? What dreams have I been dreaming my whole life? Am I fulfilling them? Are they truly my dreams, coming wholly from within? Or am I trying to fulfill the dreams or uphold the demands of another? Am I living the life I really want to live? The answers to such questions may be surprising!
I see very clearly that my childhood dreams of the contemplative life came solely from within. They were indicating the way to both my salvation and my darkness, or rather that through contemplating my darkness I would achieve the salvation I had really been dreaming about all along. I was not fully conscious of this when I was young, but when I think about it now I realize there was no other choice for me, and so I have to say that at some level of consciousness I really was aware that I was totally on the right path, solitary though it was.
Sometimes we must stop and contemplate where we are. We might see that our life is full of both light and dark…and both are right. – Photo by Jan Ketchel
My spiritual self wishes to tell you that you too will get to a place of freedom and purity, but my human self needs you to know that it may be a tough road—if life harasses you, that’s good! But both sides of myself would also say that if you look at where you are right now, and contemplate how you got here and what your dreams are, perhaps you will find that you are right where you always wanted to be. You might be taking your own path of heart, living a life that is directed solely from within.
Had I been given the insight that I now have when I was in my twenties, would it have mattered? Yes, I think it would have. And in truth I was being given advice and insight every day of my life, as we all are, by the world outside of me and by my deepest conflicts within. It’s just how life is, whether we are contemplating it or not.
Sending love as you take life one day at a time, trusting that you are on your path of heart, Jan
