Big Sister and the Grandmother Stone
I dream of a woman I do not know in real life, but whose books I have read, and whose lectures and interviews I have listened to.
She is older than me by a bit, maybe less than decade or so. She carries a narrative burden as peculiar and complicated as mine. I hear her trying to protect herself while telling personal truths, using herself as an example, as she streamlines and simplifies what must surely be a very messy story to make it palatable and comprehensible to normal folks
I do this too.
She is a transracially adoptive parent, as am I, and I can also hear how living in an interracial family has reshaped her relationship to whiteness, formed her politics and humbled the streak of supremacy that will never be wholly eliminated from her infrastructure.
I identify with this as well.
She is as intimate with death, loss, dying, bereavement, and potentially terminal diagnosis as I am. She has survived losses I hope never to encounter. Although if she knew my story at all she might say the same thing about me.
She lives and works in liminal spaces, in the space between disciplines, religions and professions, where I have come to dwell also. She is more accomplished than I am, although it is possible her accomplishments are just different and mine are more comparable than I am comfortable considering.
She has moved her career and networks through academia, through publishing, through mythology, spirituality, and theology while my route was more clinical, psychological, service focused, and social media fueled. Nonetheless we seem to have ended up doing extremely similar kinds of work, holding similar roles in our respective communities.
She lives not far from me. I know this, along with all the other factoids because she has shared such things publicly in her written and recorded words. People also know a significant amount of personal information about me, because, like this woman, I feared if I couldn’t find some way to make all the nonsense and agony, I have survived into something useful that it might kill me, sitting there, just festering.
If I were to know her personally, I would not exactly defer to her as an elder or a teacher although I certainly admire her expertise, nor would she be a peer. In Korea, women use the word “Unnie” for this role. Although it translates literally as “older sister” it is used for a slightly older female, and conveys relational proximity, warmth, and respect. I have been called Unnie by some beloved juniors.
I have never had an Unnie.
This unmet purely theoretical sister has a very niche but very devoted fan- base — I know because I have met those who idealize her — sifting out the wisdom she has extracted from violence and tragedies she has lived through, lives with, like sorting sarira from the ashes. I’ve seen people admire her knowingness without really considering the horrors she has survived, that I suspect carried her near to the brink of madness and back again. Probably more than once.
Same.
I know enough about the archetypes that are projected upon her, and the shadows of those archetypes: Mother-Figure, Wise Woman, Spirit-Fairy, Sorceress. I know their burdens, costs, ego-inflations, and temptations, because I am sometimes on the receiving end of a similar, but not identical, projection screen.
Although I must state again that I do not know this woman, and she does not know me – I can hear and see and recognize some of the pieces in her puzzle. I’ve been trained to assemble such pictures from lots of scattered little pieces.
And of course, there are many differences between us: She wears her funny kind of notoriety, status, and authority seemingly with much more comfort than I can.
I am likely shy-er, more introverted, more inhibited, and certainly more uptight. She is a much bigger hippie than I know how to be, although that may have been more of an option for her generation than mine.
I don’t know how we would get a long if we met. It is possible her warmth and confidence would reach past the barriers of my aloofness. There is a certain kind of extrovert I am happy to be swept up by. But it also possible that I would – ashamed of my big-sister-hunger – end up making myself invisible and say little to nothing at all if I were to encounter her in person. The more basic respect I have for someone the less I am capable of gushing. It’s possible that I would keep my admiration so under-wraps that it was undetectable.
It’s also possible that she would be too - what - corny? earnest? uninhibited? - for me to withstand without becoming possessed by self-consciousness. My cognition is my intuition’s primary collaborator, and I am often left feeling stiff, frozen, incapable when I am invited to run my intuition through my heart or my body instead.
I can’t do expressive group exercises or suspend my disbelief and go with the flow in crowds. I don’t make the “ahh-oooh” noise at sporting events. I don’t share what I am grateful for at Thanksgiving. Collective religious and magic ritual with its audience participation freaks me out. I don’t dance at weddings. I don’t pray out loud. The best I can do is sit in silence, in expectant waiting, Quaker style. My religious instincts are deep and hidden and profoundly private, protected perhaps. I can barely assign personal words to them. I love to talk about their theoretical, historical, philosophical, and cultural implications.
She is clearly more extroverted than I could ever be, much more networked with a larger community and far more colleagues and collaborators, a veritable choir, than I have ever had. I have limped along as a one-man-band, playing all the parts of my idiosyncratic song myself.
So, this pseudo-Unnie appears in my dream as the leader of some small group, that is undergoing a graduation ceremony or celebrating the end of some project. She dances to the background music and passes out glasses of wine. This woman then gives us two gifts: The first is to commemorate completion. The second is to acknowledge a new beginning.
The first gift is a hand-painted candle holder in the shape of an eight-pointed star. Instead of wick and wax the candle is made of intricately and tightly folded paper. The fire is a little wilder and more unpredictable than a candle, a miniature fire pit.
At some point the woman has a chenille blanket draped over her knees, and I grab her shin and shake it once, urgently, when it gets too close to the flame.
She then hands us the second gift. Large pendants on leather cords, fashioned from bone and horn and stone. They are identical to one she wears herself, only the stones are different colors, umber, dark blue, black.
“A gift from the ancestors” she says, and even in the dream I am conflicted and freeze up momentarily. Is this appropriating a cultural, religious, familial model that I am not entitled to? Or is this undermining the arrogance of my internalized whiteness that has taught me that my ancestors are dead and have no further influence on my life and those living in the present are the victors over the past?
Am I going to have to chant something? Repeat after her? Can I do this? Can I say “pass”?
But then I look down at the pendant she placed around my neck, and I see the stones are bright pearlescent white, moonstone or mother-of-pearl and I somehow know they are from my grandmothers, and I feel my chest swelling with joy – corny or not - as these grandmother stones rest upon my heart.
Although I have thought about, in waking life, sending this woman a note, thanking her, and letting her know about the spaces that our professional lives intersect, I don’t think this dream is about that, although it is not inconceivable our paths might cross one day.
My hunch is that this is a dream of my personal unconscious, an encounter with a shadow-self, the self I might become in a decade or so. Who I might grow into if I live that long, and can transcend my inhibitions, my judgement of self and others. If I learn how to receive from my communities and not merely serve them. The self I might be one day if I was less afraid of the fire, if I let my heart or God-forbid, my body become my intuition’s dancing partner. If I can give up being so ridiculously self-sufficient. If I could stop hiding my spiritual life away like a shameful secret and let the shining gifts from the feminine divine, sit joyfully on my heart.
