Butterfly Wings
July 7, 2008
by Jeffrey Pierce
When I went to bed last night, I did some shamanic work, conciously opening myself up on a spiritual level before I went to sleep. What sorts of things did I do? I'll detail them in today's article.
During the night I was given a dream rich in symbolism.
In last night's dream, I didn't have all of the pieces for a major project that I was working on. Not physical resources (like materials), but symbolic resources, like when there's one more lesson that you need to learn or one more person that needs to be involved. To find the piece, I needed to drive to Washington State and bring back a woman with an Irish name. A trip for which I packed a surprisingly large amount of gear (both backpacking and a suitcase) to go on, considering that it's basically a day trip in my world.
I didn't have my car current car to undertake the journey, but my previous vehicle - my trusty old 1988 Subaru station wagon. There were several sub-plots during the trip to Washington...
- A meeting in a nocturnal parking lot with Bri's father. He was giving me an important piece to the puzzle as we were parked in a truck stop parking lot. (Bri's dad is a long-haul trucker by trade.) As I took the piece back to my car, a car alarm began chirping as if it was going to go off. (It turned out that it wasn't my car, but one near it that didn't belong to me.)
- A daylight meeting in a "simulated combat" scenario. It involved a bunch of really dorky guys in camo who had way too much testosterone playing an organized war game, and a discussion about climbing a mountain - right up the side of a cliff - while collecting rocks along the way. (The collection of rocks while climbing the cliff was considered a good thing and something that the main guy took pride in attempting to do himself.)
When I finally returned home with the woman (she was never physically present, but I still "brought her back with me"), there was a massive spider's web stretched between three trees (there was a tree in the middle) outside of my front door. It was higher than I was tall and proportionally sized liked butterfly wings. (To make sure that I didn't miss the symbolism, a passer-by actually slightly altered the shape of the web, detaching part of it so that it was literally shaped like butterfly wings.) Instead of being composed of interlocking threads, it had been woven by (as defined in the dream) a new species of spider that had just come into the world, the web filled with nearly solid opaque shapes (mostly circles) and collections of shapes (that made patterns of their own.) My first thought was to photograph it to share it with all of you here at Old Ways and, as soon as I had succesfully captured it with my camera I was woken up, first by the cawing of a crow (whose "caw" came in multiple series of three calls) and then by a train.