Perfection of the Morning

by Sharon Butala

  Natives—from what I know of their traditional lives from “as-told-to” writings—have no difficulty accepting that dreamworld as as real as the flesh-and-blood world of every day. I am unable to do that unequivocally. I still cling to this everyday world, out of fear, out of the apparent loneliness and lack of human warmth in that world, out of uncertainty that it is right in the sense of morally defensible to accept wholly the dreamworld. That is how it is that, seeing a coyote in flesh and blood I am afraid, or see him as Other more than I see him as a fellow creature with whom I might possibly communicate, despite the fact that in a breathtaking dream a coyote looked meaningfully at me and I wasn’t afraid.

  For example, once I came upon a crescent of stones half-buried in the grass and almost completely covered by lichens, both circumstances suggesting, but not completely proving, that they had been placed there in very ancient times. The crescent was about seven feet from point to point, and I immediately thought of the moon and of lunar worship. That night I dreamt that I was to establish a place of worship for women at that site. This I certainly did not do; I thought, If I were Native, I would follow the dream’s instructions, but I am not Native, and the very idea of even suggesting such a thing to women makes me feel like an utter fool. Despite my awe, my sense of blessedness, my overwhelming gratitude for these visions and dreams, in practical ways, most of the time, I carefully hold the two worlds apart.

  And yet sometimes it seems to me, this last year or so, that when I see a coyote watching me, or deer near me in a field, I am less afraid or startled than I used to be. Sometimes I even think that they are less afraid of or startled by me, as we both hold still and from a safe distance study each other.

  LUNA

  I had been here seven years when my sense of alienation and being alone in the world had culminated in the dream where I saw the word “anomie” written across the sky. Thus began a period lasting about five years of the most intense psychic travails. I have read and reread my journals in an attempt to sort out the important things that were happening in my personal life—my mother’s cancer and eventual death, a severe illness of Peter’s—what was going on in my writing life—the publication of three more books—my psychic journey as it was expressed in dreams, and my extensive reading in order to understand what was happening to me. I feel like Psyche who was taken by Venus to a huge pile of many grains mixed together—wheat, barley, millet, vetches, beans, lentils—and ordered to sort them into separate piles before nightfall if she was ever to regain her happiness. Psyche despaired. But while she was given help by a hill of ants who did the job for her, I seem to be on my own and will never be able to make a perfect separation. It probably doesn’t matter if it isn’t perfect; what matters is that I feel reasonably satisfied by the way which, after diligent effort, I have managed to sort my experiences of those years. While Psyche’s reward was to be reunited with her lover, Cupid, things are not so easy for mortals. We are never free of trials, but they do become more understandable and therefore more bearable as one grows older.

  I seem to have spent 1984 gearing up for what was to follow: the period of mysterious dreaming which was at its most intense in 1985, and especially 1986. Sometimes the dreams were simple and symbolic, but more often there was a narrative thread to them. Night after night I crossed the Saskatchewan River on foot, alone, in the dry summer heat with the sun beating down and the shore the palest sand; sometimes I crossed by a bridge on which I could never reach the far side without putting my life in danger; sometimes I waded across. I was always carrying snakes, passing snakes, being harassed by snakes, some of which were clearly magical in that they were often a shade of red—from coral to wine—and glowed as if with internal light. Night after night I was in water, sometimes the river, more often the ocean.

  As I look through my journals it now seems to me that what seemed at the time to be separate dreams were sometimes increasingly detailed and more profound versions of the same dream. For example, in November 1984 I had the first of three dreams in which I was in very deep water on a raft. In the first dream the raft was crossing Halifax harbor and I was swimming beside it holding on to a rope. In the second, in March 1986, the raft was a brilliant pink, a magical color, and it was growing smaller and sinking so that I was sometimes up to my neck in great waves, although the raft never completely sank. The third dream, about five months after the second, was extensive, detailed and deeply disturbing, and this raft had a captain. She was a woman.

  In fact, I had many dreams about women, mysterious dreams, often in which two or three of my real-life women friends would appear together as my companions, once in which my sisters and female cousins and nieces appeared as all the same age, a flock of beautiful young women, wearing white dresses, who ran together laughing. In the two most important of these dreams a strange, powerful woman appeared and was the central figure. And finally, in early 1987, this series seemed to culminate in a dream in which a dwarf woman, another magical figure, appeared and with the brightest and most welcoming of faces, invited me into her home. The major dreams of this period haunted me and I spent literally years with my nose buried in books trying to understand them.

  At the beginning of 1985 before I had finished The Gates of the Sun, I had already begun to think about my next novel, which I had decided would be about the women of this farming/ranching community. I had already begun to call it Luna. It becomes very difficult to set these events in a strict chronological order, but it would have been about the same time that I tackled Robert Graves’s magnificent, spellbinding and eccentric masterpiece, The White Goddess.

  The older I get and the more I see of the world, the more I understand the extent of, and the more sorrowful I feel about, the subjugation of my gender: about how men abuse women, the best men, with the best motives, by completely missing the point, by failing to support even in trivial ways, by expecting us all to be mothers to them whether we are or not, in short, in small ways, day after day, century after century, denying us our full humanity. Robert Graves, whatever he might have been in his personal life, did women a great service when he wrote The White Goddess. Reading it was like opening a door in a shabby house into a room filled with treasure. That it might be possible to believe in a feminine universe! That women might be whole! That we might have a history of our own, an archetypal existence not as wounded, failed men, as graceful handmaidens or chattel, but as women were or woman was, at the deepest level, amazing and gratifying to me. I never wanted that book to end, but when it did I set off in search of other books of comparable depth, vision and sensitivity toward the feminine. It helped of course that I was thinking hard about Luna and how to write it. Through a mixture of my own struggles to find a workable Self, my dreams, and my sense that I couldn’t write a book about women till I had a sense of who women were—who they had started out as at the dawn of creation, who they were aside from the warping of the patriarchal culture—I began to read books about women by women, since both Jung and Freud had failed me in this regard. While most of the many books I read were by women, I didn’t shun books simply because they were written by men. Early on I sought out Esther Harding’s Women’s Mysteries, but I also read Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother. I began to read female Jungian analysts, especially Marion Woodman (Addiction to Perfection and The Pregnant Virgin), and Shuttle and Redgrove’s The Wise Wound and, later, Redgrove’s The Black Goddess. I read Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, believing that a poet could tell me more than a feminist academic. I went back in time with the books of feminine archaeologists like Marija Gimbutas who wrote The Language of the Goddess, among others. I read the books of feminist theologians, historians and more eccentric writers like the woman who calls herself Starhawk. I read myths in which women appeared, believing that if there was no record in history of who we were thousands of years ago, perhaps the truth was lodged in these ancient stories and I might tease it out and piece it together. I tried to figure out what was basic and universal and to separate
from it what was not. (It is basic and universal that we give birth to children.) I was trying to find a grounding in the feminine both for myself and my own life, and for the women of my book Luna. Where I was not driven by the needs of my book, my dreams drove me.

  In April 1985 when I had been thinking about Luna for a few months, I had one of the major dreams of my life. In it, I was trying to cross a border into a foreign country which was a desert country, very hot and with palm trees everywhere. My companion was a woman. Both of us were wearing white robes and headdresses which were like both those nuns wear and those of desert people. Our headdresses fit tightly around our faces, hiding our hair, but hers had a black band on it which mine didn’t have. I seemed to be her acolyte. As we approached the border guard he spoke to her in another language. She said to me in an undertone, “You’d better think of an Arab name,” but I couldn’t. The name I came up with was that of a Jewish friend, but I was able to cross anyway because then I was sitting high on a hill at a round table under a tree with my companion and two or three other shadowy Arab-looking figures, I don’t know if men or women, but who seemed to be smirking at me. In the center of the table was a bowl of fruit. In a casual, unthinking way I reached out, took an orange and without peeling it, bit into it. The woman told me that I should have washed it first, that it would make me very sick, that I would die. She then pointed to the bottom of the hill where I could see through the palm trees small rectangular buildings which she said were houses for washing fruit.

  What was most extraordinary in the dream was the woman herself: she was authority itself, but at the same time she was completely without emotions. I don’t remember her voice, but she had smooth, light olive skin, a full face and dark eyes. When she spoke it was the absolute, unadorned and unequivocal truth, conveyed without a hint or trace of affect—no pity, no anger, no affection or warmth or coldness either. She had to be a representation of an otherworldly figure, and I have always thought of her as such, as a goddess, or as Jung might describe her, as the Wise Woman, or as other less imaginative people might, as a wiser aspect of my self.

  She appeared again three months later in a dream, but this time she was robed in a gown like the white one—black this time—but that resonated richly with hints of other colors. Her message, which she conveyed twice while looking straight into my eyes, was a hopeful one. Twice, with absolutely no hint of eroticism, she showed me her breast, a symbolic gesture saying, I thought, that life was still full of sustaining richness and beauty.

  The dream about eating the orange is still clear and bright in my memory. I puzzled over it for years, searching book after book for clues as to what it meant. In fact, I didn’t fully understand it until I was writing this book when I suddenly realized that a paragraph I had just written—a metaphorical statement of the problem in my coming here to live—was, in fact, a statement of the dream: how I had closed my eyes and leaped and when I opened them I found myself in a strange country, with strange customs, where I didn’t even speak the language. I had always known that the dream had to do with death and I had made the common mistake of wondering if it was a prediction of real death. I began at last to see that it was about the death of the old Self, the Self I had been when I first took that major step of giving up my old life and coming here to make a new life. That I had not known what I was doing when I reached out for the fruit of this life, and that as the dream said, it had indeed killed me. Even the symbolic orange which so baffled me I finally realized was the fruit I associated with wilderness—on my first visit here I had been stricken with déjà vu when I was offered an orange.

  In mid-July 1986 I dreamt I opened a book a friend had given me and inside it I found an old, pressed twig. As I watched, the twig grew full and round, its leaves unfolded and swelled and turned green and it became a branch. Then, one by one, three trumpetshaped, blue flowers sprang out on it and blossomed to fullness. I awoke and thought of Aaron’s magical rod that brought plagues to the Egyptians, of the golden branch hung with bells the Irish poets—ollaves—carried with them in honor of Brigit, Goddess of Poets, of the Golden Bough which Aeneas plucked from a tree and carried into the underworld, which made it possible for him to return to the upper world (and which both Frazer and Graves remark was mistle-toe), of Gilgamesh who, with great hardship, went down to the bottom of the cosmic sea to collect the Branch of Immortal Life. I thought of the ancient and recurring symbol of the Tree of Life.

  I searched through my books for an interpretation on a level more clearly a part of my daily life and found this in Jung’s Man and His Symbols: “An ancient tree or plant represents symbolically the growth and development of psychic life [as distinct from instinctual life commonly symbolized by animals].” I took this as a sign that I was nearing the edge of the forest, that whatever I had been through in my crisis was resolving itself, that I had survived these trials and that things would begin to be easier, clearer, simpler, although I could not see how, nor any reason why they should.

  I have mentioned a deeply disturbing dream in which the ferry captain was a woman. It occurred on August 15, 1986, which is—in view of my intense efforts to find some grounding as a woman, both for myself and for other women, I am sure not a coincidence—the night of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and in pre-Christian times, of the chief celebration of Diana, the Moon Goddess. It was the night of the day I finished the first draft of Luna, ten years after I had come here to live, and this dream, too, is as clear to me now as if I had dreamt it only last night.

  It was the third of the raft dreams and in it I was swimming in inconceivably deep water alongside a barge, which I hung on to with one arm. The barge was oily and dark and loaded with boxes. It had only one passenger, a Victorian gentleman wearing an over-coat, a hat, a scarf and gloves. His face was completely hidden and only his dark eyes glowed out at me. The captain standing at the wheel was a woman. She was tall, slender, with long, thick, wavy honey-blonde hair. She wore a captain’s hat, a heavy dark jacket, a narrow short skirt and her feet and legs were bare, a detail which seemed in the dream to be very important.

  It seemed to be night, although not so dark that we couldn’t see, and we were crossing a deep, dark river. I was swimming as hard as I could and finding it difficult, kicking and thrashing about and swimming a crawl stroke with one arm while I held on to the barge with the other, but I had no sense of giving up. Far, far below me in the depths of the water, I could see faintly a gigantic man-o’-war. We came to a house and the captain stopped the ferry and I wandered through the house, while she opened and closed all the cup-board doors searching for something. In the bathroom she looked at her reflection in the mirror. The house had no curtains and no furnishings at all, and there was no glass in the windows and no doors in the openings and the floor was unimaginably deep water. Then we were at a second house. It was exactly like the first, except that it had a damp mud floor. Again she searched it. I thought, But how will the ferry get through here? And I felt such a sense of an adventure abruptly cut off, of a voyage ended too soon. The dream ended without the ferry reappearing, with me stuck high and dry in the empty house.

  That dream also took me years to decipher. Eventually I realized it was at least a version of the myth of Persephone. We were crossing the River Styx, a river of the underworld which the dead had to cross, ferried in myths by Charon, a male, who had to be paid a coin. (Apparently the Greeks used to leave a coin in the mouth of the dead person to pay this fare). My ferry captain was a love goddess, a goddess of the moon, both of which were revealed by her very beautiful long hair, her bare feet and legs—which are sexual symbols on one level, and on another, quite possibly a substitute for a mermaid’s tail—and the mirror into which she looked. The passenger was hardest of all to determine, but in the end I finally realized with a shock of understanding, that he was Hades, whose name means “the unseen” (hence his numinous invisibility), the lord of the underworld who married Persephone after stealing her away from her mo
ther, Demeter the Corn Goddess. This is, of course, one level of interpretation, called the “night sea journey.” Another level would be to say it was a dream about my life crisis, my search for a happy and fulfilling life.

  Then I realized that I had received the magical bough a month before I made my dream-journey into the underworld, and on the mythical level, the gift of the flowering bough was what made it possible for me to go there and to come back again safely.

  Around this time I had also begun to dream about girl children, babies and little girls who were so charming and interesting that I gave up celebrations to be with them, that I followed them down dark, rainy streets in the night. One of these little girls wore a siwash, a heavy sweater which is knitted by Native women and decorated with symbols out of Native mythology like the sacred Thunderbird.

  On the August night of the most ancient celebration of female goddesses, I had dreamt the dream that symbolized what I had been through, and in which I sometimes think I met the goddess for the first time. Six months later I had another of these “culminating” or “summarizing” dreams in which the Wise Woman appeared to me again near the end of the dream which had taken me from the flock of beautiful, laughing young women to a meeting with the first man I’d ever loved at eighteen—and we were both young again—through numerous horrors, including being attacked by a red knight on a red horse, who lowered his lance and charged me so that I stepped behind a leafless, dead-looking, stark bush which saved me, to her welcoming face offering me peace and solitude in her clean, bright, serene abode. And, truth to tell, I seemed more afraid of what she offered me than of even the red knight, for I said quickly and spontaneously, “Oh, no! I’m not ready yet!” and the dream ended.