Lack of Nature is the Lack of Symbols

I started reading books about psychology, stories, symbols and dreams when I was in the eighth grade. Most of what I’ve read references Jung at some point, and the best books told many stories (usually some version of a story found in an oral tradition) to show what was being discussed. Ever since this part of my life, when I read so many stories rich in symbolism, my dreams, as if fed, became quite intense. The imagery became more and more natural, and saturated, and I very rarely any more have one of those dreams that you can easily dismiss as “my brain is weird.” My dreams since then, both because of the exposure to rich symbols and my widened conscious understanding of the psychology and intimacy of symbols, have become guides to me, almost always, without question.

Also around that time I started developing a huge interconnected web of characters in my head. At first I was going to do a graphic novel about them (and I imagine any stories I finish will have to involve them), but recently they’ve become more and more just part of how I process the world around me, how I understand it. They help explain beauty and dysfunction in a more honest, intimate way.

I noticed, recently, something vital about all of these old stories that sparked my dreams and my general symbolic awareness: they intimately involve things that are nonhuman, or at the very least things that are human that we don’t like dealing with in “civilized” conversation.

I always get puzzled when people tell me about dreams like, “Well I lost my shoes.”
“And?”
“Well I never found my shoes.”

Not that I can possibly judge dreams, but it’s always strange to me simply because of the intensity of the mythology in my dreams. I think the most intense single dream I’ve had I ended up calling “Fire In the Head,” where ultimately I was shot in the head by a half-dead man who had half the face of an old man and half a face made out of raw brain matter, in the shape of his face. When I died he told me I had a week to be a ghost and figure out what my life was about (to oversimplify), and then I would be tested, to see if I could move on to the next realm. Not dinner conversation for most. However I found this to be an intense warning. I had a lot of help from my dad in interpreting this dream initially, which helped, but I think in the end the only person who can really know what a dream means is the person who experienced it, because if you figure it out, you’ll feel when it strikes close to home. And this dream warned me of something terrifying that I am still struggling with: The man who shot me was a warning; and old man, an exposed brain, signs of over-intellectualizing, well, everything, including joy. And it killed me, and in my ghost form, my transition, I have a chance to move on from that. I’m still in transition.

Actually, I’ve had a lot of ghost dreams. A particularly terrifying series of them started after the first time I watched The Wall. And except for these dreams and childhood dreams I don’t remember, I don’t have nightmares. But these dreams were scary.

My favorite protection in these dreams was the transformation of a dog I grew up with into a fox charm. We were in “the spirit room,” everything morphed, and she became a fox charm around my neck. My anima, I suppose, my protector and guide. Which shows how connected I have been to the canine world in my life – I only lived without dogs around for 3 years in high school, only during weekdays. I grew up around that energy.

But anyway to the reason I actually wrote this. I was thinking how we, as civilized people, more and more don’t interact with anything nonhuman. We interact with domesticated animals (though I have to say, having pets did wonders for me in my childhood, as opposed to seeing no creatures other than humans in my family), even man made ground. Our stimulation comes from man made objects, electronics. We even put fake stimulating mobiles over our baby’s heads at night, give them “educational television,” and all sorts of man-made everything.

I think this limits our story telling immensely, and our understanding of everything, which allows us to stay so monumentally fucked up. You can’t justify clear cutting and destroying entire communities of coyotes if you believe that Coyote threw up the stars. But you can if you believe that the world was made by a single entity for one specifies of billions, it’s easy to see how fucked up and egotistical a culture – a mythology – can become.

I mean, I haven’t met very many wild creatures. And it saddens me; my experience of the world is limited. Part of the reason I’m excited to be moving to a place that has a lot of “rewilding” is because I hope to be competent in skills that will help me interact with the real world, not the fake one we have devised. I want to be able to see eye to eye – or as close as I’m gonna get abiding by the rules I was born into – with things that are not in my image. I also hate monotheism for this reason, the simple fact that it excludes so many little “gods” and limits mythology, but that’s another rant altogether, though closely related.

I mean, what better way to appreciate this earth than to truly interact with what little wilderness is left? That’s what I hate about fake hippies and new agie people. They do the goddes earth worship dance, and THEN they run inside and eat donuts and talk about global warming. Actually my mom hangs out with some of these people, and while they were inside I was running around barefoot in the grass and giggling. Oddly enough I was the only human out there. (Not to be insulting to people who acknowledge global warming and study old mythologies; but really, if you want to worship the earth, you have to acknowledge it with your body. I’m mostly talk at this point and I’m aware of that, but I’m going to change it, and at least I like the bare earth under my feet.)

I’m not sure how to make this idea concise or better understood, so I’m just gonna stop and hope I eventually get some feedback once I get this blog out to my few buddies and my hopefully more to-be buddies across the internet and people I meet when I move.

Oh – last night I could not sleep because I was immensely frustrated, I actually wrote an entry I ended up deleting because I felt whiney, but I was honestly, genuinely frustrated enough I was sitting in bed glaring and ready to start kicking things, and then I went outside for a few minutes. My dad has 6 acres in the mountains in south WA, and so I stood outside, my feet so cold they hurt, and listened to the sound of running water and it was the most relaxing thing I could have done. The moon was reflecting brightly in the water, and just a speck of bright white was visible in the woods among the pitch black of the trees’ shadows. Even the rooster that apparently talks all night seemed more part of things than it usually does. It’s no wonder we’re all insane – most people can’t walk out to that. Hell, there are probably places devastated enough they’d have to risk their lives to get somewhere with that kind of beauty.