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To speak about “love and defiance” in relationship to each other, is a challenge.

 

For we tend to think of these two feelings and actions, as separate entities, each unto themselves.….

… We may even think of them as opposites.

Doesn’t defiance imply an edge of anger and isn’t anger anathema to love? Doesn’t love imply an absence of conflict and therefore an absence of any need for defiance? The cognitive mind does not like to be with potentially conflicting feelings and it certainly does not like holding them together.

But what if the mind has it wrong?

What if love requires us instead, to defy those voices in ourselves and those forces in the world that would have us settle for something less than the fullness of our own hearts.

What if defiance, in this way, is an act of love?

Might it be okay and/or necessary to say no, to that which is not true?

Might it be okay to say no, to that which would diminish the very tenderness that we need – to be in the fullness of who we really are? To say no, to those impulses that would have us settle for anything less than all of who we are meant to be?

Dreams, with the utmost grace and love, defy whatever stories we believe about ourselves, that would have us settle in any way.

In the dream state, we are free to go against these stories.

Free to go against whatever lineage we might have inherited, that taught us to settle for “being good” over bringing forth the innate goodness of our own hearts.

In this way, the very act of dreaming and paying attention to our dreams is a defiance of the cognitive mind, that would dismiss them as weird or as merely leftover fragments of thought from the all important waking world.

In this way, giving attention to your dreams is an act of self love.  

It is an acknowledgment of trust in the wildness of what comes to you unfiltered by the waking, cognitive brain.

In the dream state, we are free to live in a world that is beyond whatever constructed reality we have had to learn to live in, in order to function and/or survive in a world, that for better or worse does not trust the goodness of our innocence.

In the dream world, our given names are not so powerful.

The people we thought we were, begin to lose control, when we enter REM sleep. Instead another world opens at the close. A world where our indigenous spirit has not been slaughtered or imprisoned. A world where despite the best efforts of industrialization, wilderness still thrives.  

Some part of us remembers this world.

And that part of us comes to life when our cognitive brain loses control in the hours of REM sleep.

That part of us lives in defiance of the subtle and not so subtle self hatred that is embedded in that denial of the wilder part of who we are. It lives in defiance of a culture that would normalize this hatred of self and of other

This part of us knows a kind of love, that is foreign to most of the civilized world.

It is a kind of love that can face the personal hurts and trauma of this world and not get lost in that hurt or in the world itself. It is a kind of love that can face the alienation of a culture that could elect such an abusive man to the presidency and still not get lost in that alienation or in any of the fights and dramas, that surround that alienation.

This love knows that its existence is in and of itself, a defiance of the abusiveness that creates the isolation and self hatred, that is at the root of trauma and of alienation. It is a defiance of the culture that could bring such abuse to power.

Dreams invite us to know this love.

Love that lives below the sentimental love, that would have us pretend that this abuse, this hurt, this alienation does not exist or is not so widespread.

Love that does not settle for just stopping the abuse but calls beyond the abuse and alienation, to the brilliance, the beauty, the joy of life, that so many have forgotten. Love, that like our dreams, calls us to be in the dance of remembering.

Calls us also to be in the dance of creating.

Creating, because none of us know for sure what the remembering of that love will look like tomorrow.

All we can know is the feeling of love and defiance. The feeling that makes us want to be in that dance regardless of the outcome, regardless of the not knowing. All we can know is the act of love and defiance, that is the fullness of our hearts being birthed into this world in any given moment.

Your dream is a call to that dance.

A call to the subtle beat of deeper consciousness that our cognitive minds cannot silence. Consciousness that no amount of civilization can ever destroy.

Our choice is to let go of needing to fully understand what that is. To instead simply trust the resonance of that music. To simply trust ourselves. Simply take the one step out onto the dance floor. The one step into the dance with our dreams.

With love and respect,

Bill St.Cyr