AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

I received a very kind comment today and was reminded of this article that I wrote shortly after my husband died - and how much I miss him. He was one of the most amazing human beings I've ever met. I was raised in a family that did not encourage individuality and creativity. He gave me the confidence to express myself artistically and taught me some valuable skills. Be sure to read his story, the link is below.

A Tribute To A Great Dreamer

Joe William Shed, Jr. passed away on June 18, 2005 after a lifelong battle with cystic fibrosis. I had the great joy and honor of being loved, cherished and taught by this man, who was grateful for every breath, every friend, every experience in his life. Joe was a perceptive dream interpreter and we enjoyed sharing this in our relationship. We often had the same or similar dreams. This is his story.

Wow, Thanksgiving is less than a week away. Where did the year go? I was going to have to write about these lovely birds that sometimes stop traffic in rural Oklahoma eventually. On more than one occasion, I've had to stop to allow a whole little turkey family to cross the road.

In our country, the turkey symbolizes tradition, family and giving thanks. These large birds can provide a meal for many and are a symbol of abundance.

As a Native American animal totem animal, the turkey symbolizes sacrifice - it gives its life so that others may thrive. It is believed that if one has the turkey as a totem, the person is unselfish in giving to others.

Week of November 20th - 27th

There's a wonderful slideshow on Karen and Vicki's site where you can view each card. Just choose Ace of Cups from the pick list:

Motherpeace Slideshow

Given that the upcoming week will involve family togetherness, the home and bonds with those we care the most deeply about, it doesn't surprise me at all that this card came up this evening. The atmosphere of the card is peaceful, portraying a blue sky with few clouds, a calm, aqua ocean, a soothing fountain and two swans. The querent, naked and vulnerable, dives into the fountain head first.

I thought I'd try posting a weekly Motherpeace card in addition to the Dream Symbols Dictionary. For those who aren't familiar with the Motherpeace Tarot, it was created by two women who shared a feminist approach to the tarot. The theme is based on the ancient days of goddess worship and tribal cultures as well as shamanic magic, spiritual journeying and healing. I've owned the deck for years but it really started speaking to me loudly about six months ago. I do wish that Tom would add more blog categories. Tarot is more spiritual than supernatural for those of us who use it as a tool for self-reflection and spiritual growth but I'm not sure that it fits under religion and philosopy, either.

This deck is more than tarot. The "Little People," as the creators call them, are often engaged in tribal and community scenes, depicting women in many phases of strength and spiritual work. It's used by some therapists and social workers in their work with clients.. Although the images are ancient, they still depict the dramas of everyday life that we all face. Although the first edition was written in 1983, it's still so timely that you'd think it was written within the past year. The historical and mythological information presented is extremely thought-provoking - in fact, freaky - because our life today has many parallels to the life that women lived in various periods of history. Although we like think we've learned something and that gender roles in society have changed, in many ways the structure of our society hasn't changed at all.

Motherpeace has come under a lot of criticism for being blatantly feminine-oriented. I won't deny that - but we all have both masculine and feminine traits and qualities, what Freud termed the anima and animus. Society has imposed gender roles on us for centuries, causing us to either deny or squelch some of the qualities of the opposite gender that we naturally possess, creating disconnection and imbalance. Sometimes when we do recognize and nurture these energies, they can spiral out of control, such as in the case of one who becomes overly aggressive in an effort to retaliate for being perceived as weak due to gender stereotyping.

If you're a man reading this, just adapt it to your own interpretation. In tarot, as well as in dreams, male and female symbols can represent their opposites because the symbols are referring to qualities and characteristics rather than the physical or biological.

Journeys With Motherpeace - Week of November 12th -19th

Rather than having recurring dreams, where the dream basically repeats itself, my dreams tend to reflect recurring themes. Dreams with recurring themes are a bit different than recurring dreams. With recurring dreams, your unconscious is pointing to the same unresolved issue over and over again. Recurring themes point to similar feelings and patterns within the way we handle different situations in waking life. Water leaks and damage have been with me for a few years now.

As a dream symbol and in most earth based religions, water symbolizes the emotions. Water corresponds with the west within the concept of the four directions. Emotions encompass feelings from love to fear to anger to heartbreak to weakness to strength.

So, leaking water in dreams represents a leaking of emotions or loss of power. Dreaming of a leak that you can't stop might symbolize an emotional situation in waking life that seems to be out of control. Passively watching a leak without taking action to repair it might be an indication that you are in a reflective stage and are not quite sure whether you want to repair the leak or just let it go.

Driving home tonight on the dangerous rural highway with its curves and drops, I was very conscious of the darkness. It's rained most of the day and while the moon is waxing to full, the sky is so cloudy that it was pitch black. I felt uneasy and afraid, but I also felt moved to reflect upon the light side of the darkness.

Darkness is the absence of light. For most of our society, darkness is associated with fear and wrongdoing. We sometimes feel very vulnerable at night, some children - and adults - are afraid of the dark. When it's dark, we are far more frightened by "things that go bump in the night" that wouldn't bother us at all during the day. Darkness can cover actions that a person doesn't want seen. We sometimes describe the rough times in our lives by referring to them as "a dark year" or "a dark time."

Sorry, folks - unfortunately, news of a suicide yesterday inspired this one - but this symbol isn't always included in most dream dictionaries....

At this time of year, when fall is turning to winter and the animals and plants are going into hibernation to awaken renewed in the spring, we are reminded of the natural cycle of life, death and rebirth. While dreams of death are rarely associated with physical death, suicide has a slightly different meaning.

You may have heard the saying, "Depression is anger turned inward." Suicide is a form of aggression toward the self, a sign of feelings turning inward that can cause destruction without the possibility of rebuilding. Anger and depression can literally kill the spirit unless one remembers that emotions, feelings and events are actually external to who we are at our core. At our core, we are peaceful and loving - negative feelings and events don't have to affect us when we choose to watch them through the window instead of answering the door.

Have you been carrying around feelings of guilt, shame or despair that you can't seem to shake? Has there been an ongoing problem that you are avoiding or can't see the light at the end of the tunnel? Your dream is giving you a clear message that you'd better deal with these feelings or situations before they do kill you with physical, emotional or spiritual pain.

After Joe died, I had to go back to work full time and was unable to extricate myself from my previous part-time job as planned. I developed health problems because of overwork, had little online time and when things finally did slow down, I had major problems with my little local ISP, having no service for nearly a month. Thanks to me and the Taurus stomping fit I threw and threats I made, they now have a weekend on-call number, but the universe was telling me something.......

Writing the column as a volunteer editor on what was supposedly the second largest women's site in the world (or so the site owner said, I never saw that stat anywhere) was paying off for a site owner who rarely contacted anyone outside the clique with anything other than criticism while she made her living from our efforts. I'll give her credit in that we retained copyright to anything we wrote and any money we made on the site - mostly Amazon affiliate fees - was ours to keep as opposed to other sites that take a percentage. She wrote my site prior to my coming on. When I started, the site traffic was 23,000 per month. In less than a year of working my ass off to build and organize my section of the site, I was receiving 150,000 visitors per month. My site was even used by at least one college psych professor to teach a unit about Freud and Jung. But when I seemed to fall off the face of the earth, the site owner didn't bother to pick up the phone to see if I was okay or to at least say "thank you" although she was fully aware of the situation.

This was the second time I'd let myself get into this situation (I helped build a large and well known pagan forum just to be told, along with several others who'd also put in a lot of work, knowledge and time, by the site owner that we were no longer needed - and he was supposedly a personal friend of ours) and the Goddess was finally telling me in no uncertain terms that while life gives to the giver, I often give way, way too much.

So, I found myself spending a bit of time on MySpace and seeing other people using it as a networking resource based on the gazillion friend requests I'm getting for dating services, vitamins and musicians. I've never really wanted to write a dream dictionary because it's been done to death - and the interpretation is really the dreamer's. But I do miss it, I need to get myself writing again and thought that this would be a good place to start. So this is just for me, to get up some momentum in getting back to writing, and for you to enjoy and hopefully learn from.

I've often found it ironic that my Master's in Social Work is in Administration and Community Practice, yet I've yet to find a job where the opportunity to develop communities hasn't been thwarted or completely nonexistent. In my current job, the administrators have seen fit to choose (with no formal hiring process) individuals with no professional training to fill positions such as Volunteer Coordinator. They've done absolutely nothing over the past year and when I've stepped in to help and gotten immediate results, I've been received with resentment. I will give them some slack in that they've been asked to fill these roles in addition to their other full time positions.....I need to stop writing this stuff down because it makes it very clear that I need to look for another job! Anyway......If you don't know where I'm going, you might want to stop reading now because this is going to be one long-ass blog

"The Clay Knows What To Do." I remember Joe saying that when he was helping me learn to sculpt. It's proven that over and over again. I rememmber the pregnant goddess who refused to let her hands be placed where I wanted them. When the buyer received it, she wrote and said that her friends were always teasing her about the way she rested her hands on her belly - exactly the way her goddess did. I made a blessing bowl this past week for a friend, and it came out of the oven with an air bubble that wasn't there before, in the position of the third eye. Looks like she has a natural bindi. Another that I made about a year ago came out with a perfectly shaped heart on her hip from variations in the clay. Amazing. It took me a long time to learn to put the clay down for a while when it wasn't cooperating. I also learned that I had to yield to it rather than forcing it to yield to me. When I let it go, it creates itself.