Part of the Dreaming

...along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.

David Abrams

In the garden of the home in which I grew up, was a wall alongside a tree my father had planted when we were just children (and in which he built a treehouse for one of my birthdays). As a teen, I would often sit atop that wall, and watch as the sun set in the piece of sky between Table Mountain and Lion's Head. My favourite sunsets were those full of clouds, and I loved imagining whole countries hidden in them, castles perhaps, or beautiful, magical homes - places like Rivendell or Lothlorien.

I needed this to be true, that the world was more than I could see or hear, more than my senses and experience allowed for. Sometimes I slipped out of time and entered a wordless space in which I felt utterly at home, present and at peace, my body a dwelling of light.

I think now of those moments as ones in which I became aware of what Abrams calls the Dreaming of the world, of my participation in that dreaming. In subsequent years I've allowed myself to be drawn into conversation with a world I now consider more animate and immediate to my senses. Each encounter with a tree, a dragonfly, owl or starflower is an opportunity to listen and to belong.

I do not always find human company easy, and frequently experience social interaction as overwhelming. Too much of it and I become brittle, ill, disoriented. The more-than-human world (a term coined by Abram and now used more widely) offers me a place to recalibrate, come back to myself. In Forest paddock is a great pine, whose presence is a shelter, and in winter the long dark and cold light of the stars is an invitation to rest.

As the year turns towards a close, and my need for stillness is swept away by the demands of the season, I turn again and again to this vast imagination, allow myself to simply be part of the dreaming. I make time to nourish the deeper places of my own imagining, my own dreaming. (You can find a poem I wrote in reflection on some of these ideas in my latest Cloudlight post.)

P.S. You can find more of Abram's thoughts in this article from The Marginalian, and also on this website. I highly recommend his book, The Spell of the Sensuous.