Celtic Knot

The path of my life is like a celtic knot.  The unbroken thread twists and turns in unpredictable and unexpected ways.  The pattern unknowable until the thread’s very end is tucked behind the final connection.   

The first time I became aware of birth and death days touching was on October 16, 1987, the day of my father’s death.  October 16^th was the day my mother had chosen for my planned caesarean birth.  

I met Elle hours after my husband I returned from Ethiopia.  So strong was our commitment to Dare’, a community of healers, even extreme jet lag, brain fog, emotional exhaustion couldn’t keep us away.  I tried not to allow shock register in my expression when I saw the bulge on the right side of the jaw of this beautiful woman who had come to us for healing.  She was to become both a precious sister and wise teacher to me over the coming years, but in that moment I saw only a woman in need calling forth the healers in all of us. 

It was heartbreaking a few years later when Elle told us we weren’t the community she needed to hold her at end of her life.  I wished it were otherwise, but I knew she was correct.  She returned to a tiny community on the northern CA coast precious to her earlier in her life.   Her life contracted so she could pay careful attention to her healing and to the spiritual teaching of her cancer.

Blood Lines

The experience I described in ‘When One of us is Wounded, We all Bleed’, when I dreamed my husband punched his brother and then woke with blood on my hand, got my attention.  Writing from the dream helped me to discover some of the ways I have blood on my hands.  Still I felt the dream was asking more of me.

Because my wounding occurred in a church sanctuary and because I was raised Roman Catholic, my experience of blood appearing on my hand without apparent cause made me think of the stigmata. Stigmata are bodily wounds, sores or sensation occurring in the location of the crucifixion wounds of Jesus. It felt presumptuous  of me to relate my experience to the stigmata suffered by devout and selfless holy ones, still the similarity was eerie and I felt compelled to follow that thread.

Bleed Through

During a Women’s Dream Quest, I received a dream of my husband punching his brother in the face.  I woke with blood on the knuckle of the ring finger of my left hand.  I went to the men’s room for my morning toilet, and found blood on the sink.

I now have a new name for the experience of encountering the same image in dreams and waking life.  I call it bleed through.