Nuestra Señora de Soledad The statue of Our Lady of Solitude, Patroness of Oaxaca

I am sitting in Vices & Versa, the best noisy beer bar in Little Italy, or in Montreal if you ask me. It’s me and several middle-aged men lined up alone at the bar, while all the tables behind us sound like celebrating. My friend just left – all giddy and red faced – his girlfriend’s due date was Saturday. They might have a baby tonight.

The note from my dreams last night reads: “an altar to loneliness” and I don’t remember this dream but I can relate to this feeling. If I’m being honest, I am jealous and angry and totally enamoured with every pregnant person and every expectant partner. I am 37 and not there yet, so maybe it’s too late. If I’m being dramatic then My Womb Is An Altar To Loneliness.

My therapist once asked me if I had an altar. I was startled and delighted, like No! But Yes! Perfect idea. Great work, therapy. She suggested making an area in my home clean and beautiful and full of personal symbols of my own health and Self and triumphs.

I was great at altars when I was a teenager. I had a table covered in candles dripping dramatically in my Mom’s basement, images in heavy metal frames, icons, incense, selected rocks, and an important sculpture of a frog. I liked to lie on the floor near it with the lights turned out listening to Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin. Because Billie knew everything.

“If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.” – Billie Holiday

I have gotten good at altars again, following the advice of a thoroughly respectable therapist. There is something to the idea of making spaces in my house that look like the inside of my heart or my unconscious or my hopes. There is something empowering in making up my own symbols: pine trees, rose petals, selected rocks,  a sculpture of an ear, a small wooden doll.

And admittedly, there is something to the idea of an Altar to Loneliness.

An altar puts the loneliness on the outside where I can sit with it, companionably.

I look at it and it looks back into me. Together we make something that wasn’t there before.

I try to write about my dreams every day. It’s a different kind of fertility, and for now it’s enough.

Or at least, it’s what I’m doing.

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PS – I didn’t know until now, searching for images that look like my dreams, that this dream echoed a line from a poem I had never read, Sherman Alexie’s The Facebook Sonnet.

Sounds about right though.

Delicious.

I remember this one image from my dreams last night…

I opened a freezer drawer, the kind at the bottom of a fridge, and it was full of beautiful, brightly-coloured popsicles covered in candy.

I’ve never seen them in real life.

They look goofy and pretty and fun and indulgent and delicious.

I don’t eat any candy really, but I love the look of these.

They remind me now of the movie The Witch, and Black Phillip whispering “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”

Yes.

I think I am generally pretty good at living deliciously, in making regular days into adventures that are candy-coated, and in seeing the potential for sweet fun in regular moments.

I lose that power in a fog of bad news forgetting though.

And I feel weighted down by doubt.

Doubt in myself, and in the reasonableness of pursuing delight in a dark world. But in the dream the kid-like delight is right there, available on ice.

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When I was 7 years old we moved to Los Angeles – my mom and I – to live with her new husband who had gone ahead of us to get a job. We had to live for a week or so in a shady apartment complex in a bad part of town. We had a mattress on the floor and a fridge, and the pool outside was empty, and there were dark stains in the hall. My mom asked me to play inside.

I remember now I made a game of inventing popsicle flavours with everything in the fridge, and everything in the house. I mashed things and filled small popsicle containers and conducted serious taste tests. I was oblivious to the sketchy surroundings and totally entertained.

A few days later we moved to a tiny apartment on a street hung heavy with jasmine bushes where I was allowed to play outside.

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In a dark world I think we must resist the urge to put our delight on ice. Let us pull open those old drawers and share our candy-coated selves.

Our revelries, our joy. Our kid-like creativity is full of power.

So yes: retreat in order to blossom on a new street.

Rest and play to fuel your resistance.

Be kind to the little kid in you and in each of us.

Because I think they are the ones who will invent our way out of these grey days and nightmares.

Be so gentle with yourselves.

Audre Lorde.

Ceremonial Garbage Fire.

Two nights ago, after I met with my neighbour up north and agreed to buy his small lot next to mine to have a place to grow apple trees, Marc and I made a huge fire and drank a bottle of bubbly to celebrate.

We had spent the day pulling up floorboards and pulling down ceiling insulation to find rot, seal up holes, and evict generations of big-eared, big-eyed country mice. Shit rained down on us as we faced some of my worst home-owner fears, and we laughed and it was ok. In the end we were filthy and triumphant, and we had a lot of rotten wood to burn.

Turns out owning a house, especially in the woods, is a constant conversation with the elements – with the wildlife that want in, or that want your heat and food stores, or that want some of the space you take up.

We are in their world out there, so we try to be polite about it.

I had a garbage bag of dried herbs to burn, and Marc had a huge, ugly coffee table he wanted gone from the earth and so we made a kind of funeral pyre, melting the early snow.

Marc In The Snow.

The herbs were from my city garden where the thyme and lemon balm are always trying to take over.

An ex-boyfriend and I had twisted them into bundles which had filled my kitchen ceiling and given my satisfying witch feelings, until they hung up there for too long; long after it all went boom and bust and devolved into nightmares. They felt thick with bad dreams and spider webs. They burned quick and smelled like better summers to come.

Marc and I burned them in fistfuls, and made up prayers to the house-and-mouse-gods, and we cheers’ed to the fire in gratitude for finally finding each other.

And Jupiter and Venus hung out in the sky together.

AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty

At night, I dreamed a violent dream of moving that same ex-boyfriend and all his rotten bullshit out of my house and life. I wish I wasn’t still dealing with the bad vibes he left  now that I am free and happy, but I am and so it goes.

In the dream I ripped his record player from the wall while it was playing and it howled white noise that matched my fury. I yelled the truth and other women heard me and helped me. They nodded while I broke his face.

Punching and yelling is out of character for me, but I have to say, dream-me quite enjoyed it.

My dreams on this theme have definitely been getting better. I used to dream that he was in the house and I’d wake up screaming. Then I had dreams that I was face to face with him and I couldn’t say anything.

But last night’s dream ended with me spinning in the air like a circus artist while I told the true story. Almost like I was lifted up on smoke.

If you are haunted by the ghosts of abusive or otherwise bad men – or the many kinds of psychological violence wrought by patriarchy – I highly recommend a made up ritual, and a cleansing garbage fire.

Me.

Back Of The Brain

I am a nightmare person, always have been. Big horror show epics. These days the theme has generally been boiled down to various versions of: Someone Is Trying To Get In.

Last night it went like this:

It’s night and I am cleaning up around the kitchen. There is a big pile of dirty dishes and above them a huge white wall. On one side of the wall there are kitchen shelves totally stuffed with what seems at first to be more dirty dishes. But when I look closer they are cake decorating things: icings and sprinkles in bright neon colours. Messy but delightful.

Annie Sprat

The other side of the wall is bare, dirty white and spotted with mold. It’s creepy in the cold fluorescent light of the empty night kitchen.

I turn to look out the window and there – right outside the window looking in – is a woman. She is young, Asian with long black hair. Lovely in the moonlight. She waves and walks away casual, and I wave back with the distinct impression that she was too close to the house – all the way up on my lawn – to be just casually walking by waving at night.

So I rush to lock the door. But I find it partially open and it won’t close, something is in the way. I pull it open, there is a woman right there, inches from my face, already across the threshold. She is a middle-aged white woman with short mom-ish bottle blond hair and a fake smile stretched painfully, threateningly wide across her face. I scream and wake myself up yelling.

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Marc is used to the yelling. The first time he slept over at my place I woke him up with the same urgent, muffled dream screams. When I told him about that dream he changed all the locks.

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Advice I’ve been given for interpreting dreams is to consider that since these are images and symbols from your subconscious mind, you can imagine that each image is you:

I am a kitchen burdened by dirty dishes. I am messy but delightful.

I am half full of delicious and decorative delights.

I am half empty and growing dark moldy life.

I am a beautiful young woman perhaps coming in, perhaps just passing by.

I am a middle aged mom-type already here.

Terrifying.

Freaky Friday

To Live as Francis Lived: A Guide For Secular Franciscans

I remember this dream from last night: one of my favourite professors from my MA, Dr Kim Sawchuk, is walking past me on a sidewalk, somewhere. I am surprised by her haircut as she’s shaved it all close to her head, except for a band around just the bottom which is left long like a hippie monk. Or like a Franciscan, now that I think about it. Always, for me, the most endearing saints.

I say hello and she doesn’t recognize me. I introduce myself and she sort of remembers, and than says, out of the blue: “I Am Not Your Negro.”  When I wake up I’m not sure how to interpret this, but now I think I just need to go see the movie.

James Baldwin – I Am Not Your Negro

In the next dream I see one of my favourite professors from my undergrad this time, Dr Allan Hepburn, who taught American Literature. As far as I know these two teachers have never met, but they were the ones I to loved to write for. Dr Hepburn was always impeccably turned out in suits, perfect haircuts and a clean shave. In the dream though his hair is a long messy bob and he’s wearing a wide headband, and I feel like he’s allowing himself all kinds of unbridled femininity in his gestures. I tell him I love him, that I always loved him, but in a gay way. He gets what I mean and laughs. We have a loving hug and I feel how thin and vulnerable he is. Tiny and shaking.

I look over his shoulder and I see we are inside now. We are in a loft apartment high above the street with a wall of windows looking out on a grey sky. As I hold Professor Hepburn I see that there are birds inside the apartment. Small swallows flicker behind the plants. They are hunting bugs that hover in the air, and suddenly I know: the birds are here because there is no food left for them outside.

Another post-apocalyptic dream.

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Dr. Sawchuck I associate with a paper I saw her deliver at a conference one time where she made the beautiful but heartbreaking suggestion that some relationships can’t hold together because people actually, literally, hum and exist on different frequencies.

Dr. Hepburn I associate with Joan Didion. And now that I think about it, in the dream he did look a bit like her in The Centre Will Not Hold – so frail and fragile. Same bob.

Maybe the centre can’t hold, but at least there still is one…

And there are birds there.

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The other memory I have from last night is just an image:

My mom has built a garden in the basement and I am down there, weeding.