Dear Biddy,

Did you have visitors asking you to interpret their dreams? Maybe people came to you for a potion to help with insomnia so that they could sleep soundly without being disturbed by a banchee? Tossing and turning is usually associated with being worried and maybe you are being woken up for a reason, your inner self giving you a little push or shove to wake you up?

Dream work is food for the soul revealing and inviting me to make true what the unconscious mind has already created. Tossing and turning most nights these past couple of weeks and waking up to find fragments of my dreams floating up for me to grasp a thread or two. Investigating meaning around these glimpses of my inner life (with assistance of a skilled practitioner in worldwork and acupuncture) I seem to be launching into a new phase.

Time to toss and turn – like a salad I am tossing ingredients in my bowl and creating something to get my teeth into and like turning over the compost to get all the microbes turning rubbish into nourishment – I am feeling challenged and excited about what is ahead. With a blow of a breath, perhaps the cosmic energy was blowing a kiss, I am experiencing an initiation and this tells me I have accepted the invitation, although I am still not completely sure to what!  I do know that it is both molecular and galactic.

The pilgrim tosses and turns. Tossing a coat off with a change in the weather, turning an ankle when footing is unstable or stumbling over cobblestones. Tossing in an extra pair of shoes, a few band aids, some remedial herbal treatment to address an aching foot is all part of a pilgrim’s kit. So too is the taking a turn to lead or to follow, share a prayer or light the lamp.

With a cosmic breath, being despatched into an unknown; I am setting out on an unknown course.

My pilgrim’s kit is fully equipped and my journey, while invisible to me, is set. My responsibility is to toss and turn along the way to wander in freedom.

I am travelling in the knowledge and instruction from poet, David Whyte in his poem Everything is Waiting for You. It is nearly a year since I set out on my pilgrimage that took me to a landscape that inspires him and the opportunity to sojourn for a few days in his company.  The photo of David lying on the ledge of the pool (the same one that appears in the headline for this blog) unites the poet and landscape, a holy communion.

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves.

Everything is waiting for you.

— David Whyte
from Everything is Waiting for You
©2003 Many Rivers Press