Sweet dreams

The second of February was Imbolc, which is a celebration of renewal. Traditionally it's associated with pregnant/lactating ewes, and the goddess Brigid. For me though, Imbolc is a kind of festival of dreams.
The idea being that early February is at the heart of winter, and so the earth and a lot of life's force is slumbering away beneath a blanket of blue-white snow. Of course the reality is that in a modern metropolis like Montreal, only the plants and raccoons get to sleep, while the rest of us are expected to press on with the same energy as we would have in summer. And the pristine fields of snow are in fact piled up along the streets or carted out of the city in huge dump-trucks (this blew my mind the first time I saw it).
None the less, I find myself slowing down around this time of year (slowing down from snails pace to near-stop) and paying more attention to dreams and intuition. It's also quite close to my birthday (as well as my mom's birthday and a few others who are close to my heart) so it is an easy time to get introspective. Dreams are a mysterious kettle of fish, not well understood in the land of science. I know that I dream often. Well we all do, I mean to say that I often recall my dreams, at least for the first few moments of wakefulness. I am lazy about keeping a dream journal so even though they are still circling my head in the morning, they usually flit away again by mid-afternoon and sadly, I have no record of them. I find it strange which dreams stay with me through the years, not necessarily the most meaningful ones but generally the ones I had the clearest memories of when waking up. And of course, the ones I noted down as quickly as I could.
I am not well versed in dream-interpretation. While I think there must me a wealth of interesting knowledge tucked away in the secret nooks of our dreaming minds, I am quite skeptical of something that tries to place universal meanings on personal reveries. But like I said... not well versed, so I withhold judgment (mostly). I am intrigued by the concept of premonitions in dreams, although I have not really experienced it. Ok, once, back in my midwifery days, I had a dream that a client was in labor. The dream woke me up and I noted the time (around 3am). The next day, lo and behold, I was called to her birth and I found out that her labor had started around 3am.
One thing I find frustrating about dreams is their tendency towards ordinariness. Sometimes they bring me to fantastic landscapes or allow me to fly or perform other feats of unexpected magic, but often they are merely a slight twist on the everyday. Last night I was a bit luckier than usual however. In bed, before sleep, I was listening to the beginning of Eat Pray Love on audiobook. When I eventually drifted off, I was unsurprisingly transported to Rome. Never having been there in reality, my imagination was free to invent a magical dream-version of the ancient city. I can only remember scraps of the dream, but I do recall approaching the city by boat, in the evening, on an imaginary ocean (Rome is not on the coast in real life). The buildings rose up before me, elastic in my mind. It was a strange and lovely place to visit, I wish I could've taken pictures.
Well, however you choose to celebrate Imbolc (or Candlemas or Groundhog Day), I hope that Queen Mab peeks out from behind the grasshopper-wing shutters of her hazel-nut chariot and sends some juicy dreams your way.
Dreamy reading for the cold winter days:
The BFG by Roald Dahl - all about dreams, snozzcumbers, frobscottles and whizzpoppers.
What are your favorites books for reading this time of year? Or do you have music to help keep away the chill instead?
Images: The imbolc candles with snowdrops I took from this website but I recognize it as an image from the Llewellyn day-planners; Vachel dreaming is from Little Dee from April 2006; and the photo of Rome (Forum and Colosseum) by Stephen Studd, taken from Getty.

May 26th 2006

"How I got here"

The weather has been taking me back home lately. I'm a Vancouver girl at heart, but I've been away for about four years and at the moment I'm living in Montreal. For the last couple of weeks it has been every bit as grey and rainy as my sweet west coast forest home. Naturally I am loving it, feeling a very pull-on-my-wool-socks and brew-up-some-jasmine-tea kinda groove, but the locals here aren't quite so into it. Of course I understand that for some this is pretty disasterous weather. The earth around here (well more on the south shore, not Montreal proper... where there is more concrete than earth per se) just isn't used to soaking up these amounts of water so there is flooding and all maner of serious unhappiness there. But for me, and those of us whose homes are not in danger of overflowing it's really not so bad. In a weird way it eases my homesick heart a little to get a bit of that rain-soaked energy out here.Weather aside, I have been feeling rather unsettled as of late. Uncertain. Confused. Bewitched, bothered and bewildered. It has been year since I left the midwifery program, which was the whole reason I left my rainy coccoon of a home in the first place. When I left, full of hope and some seriously romanticised ideas of what it would mean to be a midwife, I did not even consider the possibiliy of not finishing. Midwife ... the word conjured up images of ancient grandmothers, wise women, village elders, rebels, agents of change. I wanted all that. I don't think I realized what it would be like to actually do the work, at least not in a more modern setting. I know I didn't realize how much I would feel like a visitor from a distant galaxy when I was working in a hospital. I wasn't skittish about the basic clinical skills stuff; drawing blood, keeping up the charts, catheters, injections so on and so forth. I will admit to a certain squeamishness about the more serious interventions, namely IV meds and baby resuscitation ... and that's not so weird because those can be scary things and I am very inexperienced. No, the thing that really got me was how all-consuming and fast paced it all was. I thought - before I knew any better - that midwifery would be a wonderful line of work for a calm, mild-manered slowpoke like me. How wrong I was! Maybe one day that would be the case, but at least for the formative years you have to dedicate all your attention on the task of learning this one thing. I mean suddenly I was carrying a pager and a cell phone! And I hate cell phones! (pagers had never even entered my consciousness). I suddenly had a car... I suddenly only had three days per month where I wasn't working/on call. Don't get me wrong, I loved a lot of it. I loved catching those babies, really loved it when partners got involved and helped to catch their own babies. I loved clinic, for the most part, because the clinic rooms were like mini-living rooms where we drank tea and chatted about life, the universe and everything (but mostly pregnancy-related stuff) with our clients who were supremely interesting women. I loved home births. There is just something so ... subversive, so courageous and so so fundamentally sane about a woman and her partner bringing their baby into the world in their own bedroom while the new grandparents bake chocolate cake downstairs. The actual reason I left (took a year off - which is now becoming two years off and maybe becoming me doing something totaly different with my life) was money. My car broke for the twenty-seventh time in a row and I ran out of money (ha ha... that makes it sound like I actually had money in the first place, no I actually ran out of credit). It didn't help that I had to move no less than seven times in those three years for the program. But the relief I felt when I could finally turn off that pager, park my car and just go back to being a selfish, moody, twenty-eight year old brat was palpable. I suddenly couldn't imagine ever going back to being (or rather pretending to be) that other person... that organized, efficient, bright, cheerful, ever-eager-to-learn health care professional. Ug.Now I am faced with the decision: do I go back at all? Is there a place for me in that world? Can I deal with that schedule, that level of sleep deprivation, that kind of selflessness, that kind of think-on-your-feet intelligence? Am I even cut out for all that?I still don't know. If I want to go back next spring (for reasons of scheduling work placements I have to go back at the same time of year that I left, which is spring) I have until october(ish) to decide. I wish I could just let the decision sit in my mind for a while and do other things and wait and see with patience and a total trust in divine subconscious revelations. But I can't. I think about it all the time. I go back and forth. I am driving my partner a bit crazy (I think, though he never complains) since this time I would be sure to drag him along for the ride. Last time we were doing the long distance thing (he is a boy-creature from Montreal, which is why I am here now and not in sublime BC) and that was extremely unkind to our relationship. He would come for a visit and I would get called out.... I would have to drive for several hours out of my precious three days off per month to see him and then we would just argue about something silly... phone calls were not nearly enough to sooth my frayed nerves. No, if I go back I need at least one person in my corner to come home and cry to when things don't go smoothly. Lucky him! I just wish that somehow I could recapture that down-in-my-bones certainty that this was my path. I mean when I first thought up the idea of being a midwife, oh so many moons ago, it seemed to fit in a way that nothing else ever had. Strangers were telling me that they thought I would be a fantastic midwife and would I please catch their babies when the time came? Everything happened in a very flowy synchronous kind of "this is meant to be" kind of way. Then slowly, as the program started and I tried to find my way in it, that certainty slipped quietly out the back door. It left a note. It's sorry but I will have to go on without it, one way or another. It wishes me well. Now uncertainty is the feeling of the hour and it doesn't appear to have anywhere else to go. Me and uncertainty are stuck together like siamese twins. Oh dear. What is to become of me?