Issue 64, December 2003
Change
©Jane Teresa Anderson, December 2003
It began with a leap. Not of faith. Or was it?
The young man in my dream made a quick decision to jump to his death. Standing on the rooftop of a high building he took a few paces back so he could get a good run at his final leap.
I was sitting on the rooftop of another high building. I looked down and saw the neat, tidy, square hole his body had cratered on impact. There was no feeling of grief. In the dream the jumper had made the right decision. All was calm and as it should be.
In a nearby hall a wedding-funeral party was in full swing. The dress code was black wedding attire. All the women wore black wedding dresses and flowing dark veils. They were celebrating their rite of passage into a new and hopefully fertile union, deeply respectful of the leap of death that had opened the way.
What ended and began for me? I’m coming to that.
But first I am reminded of the story about the baby awaiting his birth and the man awaiting his death. It goes something like this:
The man, on his deathbed, is deeply fearful. He asks his priests, “What will happen when I stop breathing? Will it hurt? Will that be the end of me?” He is suffering his final crisis of faith for he cannot imagine Heaven. Most of all, he cannot imagine surviving the painful journey to get there.
Meanwhile the baby, about to be born, is deeply fearful. He asks his angels, “What will happen when this water drains away and I am crushed into a waterless tunnel? How will I breathe? Will it hurt? Will that be the end of me?” He is suffering his final crisis of faith for he cannot imagine the new world they have told him about. Most of all, he cannot imagine surviving the painful journey to get there.
What is death and what is birth? Was the old man on his birthing bed, about to be born into the afterlife? Was the baby on his deathbed, dying to the only reality he knew? And is the journey between the two, the rite of passage, painful or do we only imagine it is so because it requires us to take the leap of faith of giving up the breath?
So many of our everyday rites of passage are death-births. We lay to rest our years as a schoolchild when we deliver ourselves into the workforce. We say goodbye to a relationship as we open the way for a new one. We kill off our old habits so we can be re-born healthier, wealthier, wiser, whatever.
While we may also be guilty, from time to time, of neglecting good stuff in our lives, of letting good relationships and good habits die, even these lead us to consider how we are to handle the new situations we have created for ourselves.
On the whole, we cannot grow, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually without taking the leap of faith-death many, many times. Old attitudes that once worked well for us must die when they no longer serve us. Their death frees us to birth new attitudes that will take us forward.
If you dislike all this talk of death, let’s change the word. The process of necessary death opening the way for birth is simply change. Change. If we want things to change we must be ready for death on some level.
So, back to my dream. What ended and began for me?
My dream reflected a very fast leap, a sudden decision for change and, at the same time, an instant acceptance of that change. In fact it tied things up very nicely. It resulted in a neat and tidy hole in the ground, no mess. And it tied things up very quickly. The mourning process was combined with the wedding celebration. The funeral-wedding was so fast it had already taken place in my unconscious (black clothes) dreaming mind. By the time I awoke, the change had been made.
During the few days leading up to my dream I had been doing some rather major tidying of the web site. I thought the job was all done. I thought I was standing on the roof of my newly constructed building, admiring the view. But the job was not done, was it?
On waking I had the sudden impulse (leap) to erase (put an end to, kill off) the old newsletter database (which certainly became a neat and tidy hole as a result). On the surface I wanted to catch up with the times and introduce an illustrated html newsletter (the one you are reading now). To do this I needed to find a new programme and set the new system in place. This all happened so fast that the funeral-wedding was in full swing before it really registered with me.
Now, here’s the thing.
The old database was over five years old and still carried many hundreds of defunct email addresses, so whenever I sent out a newsletter the first thing that would happen in response to my lovingly crafted article was a deluge of rebounded email pouring into my inbox. Instant rejection really!
Yesterday I emailed everyone on the old database for the last time explaining that the old database was about to be scrapped and asking people to opt in if they wished to continued to receive newsletters. The result? A deluge of positive emails rolled in. What a … change.
I was sitting contemplating this change, this reversal, this birth following death, when the phone rang. It had been a good week. In the same week I had opted for a spam email trap system so I no longer have to start my mornings wading through and deleting spam negativity. Somehow, at many levels, this dream has put an end to being open to negative input. Oh, the phone call?
It was a magazine editor asking me to contribute a little positive note on dreams to balance a huge slab or articles on illness and death. I smiled.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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