COMPLEMENTARY

When I remember my dream about the iridescent birds, I think: I’m the red bird (a redhead), Eben is the green, representing the natural world—grass, leaves, water (with algae like the pool I bathed in)—opposite colors on the color wheel, and so, complementary. And maybe I’m red also because I’m hotheaded and passionate, while Eben was cool and serene. Besides representing sexuality, the phallic metal cones symbolize creativity; they were the same copper cones I saw on an implement for melting wax and drawing designs on eggshells when my Camp Fire Girls troop went on a field trip to a shop in downtown Minneapolis to watch a woman making Ukrainian Easter eggs. Later, in California, I ordered the tool from her, along with some beeswax.

     Just now I thought, “Birds of a feather”—yes, Eben and I were opposites, but also alike. (I continually marvel at how succinctly dreams express complex ideas.) I’m the writer, brimful of words, Eben the mute who hardly ever speaks, yet we’re both loners, solitary in our own way—our lives running parallel on opposite sides of the world, he tending grapevines on a hillside, me tending words at my writing desk.

     Someone or other once said to me that the qualities we find the most compelling in other people are untapped potentials within ourselves. I think there’s an ascetic in me not that different from Eben, one who, living in another time or with fewer creative outlets, might have chosen a contemplative life.

     I’ve never met, before or since, anyone who was so embedded in the natural world as he was, something I yearned for too…to be that attuned to and that subsumed by nature, “to acquiesce to and commune with” what William James called “the total soul of things.”

      I suspect that part of the grief I felt at leaving him behind that day had to do with the necessity of repudiating this part of myself to become an artist. I met Eben at a crossroads in my life, and perhaps he helped illuminate for me what I was giving up. There was always a part of me that longed to renounce the world, to devote myself wholly to a spiritual life and a journey towards some degree of enlightenment.

     And the latter part of the dream? The shadowy figure in the glade was statuesque, larger than life and had the profile—as well as I could see it—of an Indian woman…American Indian, I mean, though it occurs to me that my unconscious might have been punning again—Aaron and Eben grew up in India.

     The dream vividly demonstrates to me the way I perceived power as existing outside myself, the province of other people. I wasn’t able to feel what I heard someone say in a TV interview recently –“I know when I’m in my heart, I’m unstoppable.”

     Ah! And I just made another connection—between the courting birds and the Ukrainian eggs—procreation and regeneration. So the dream is about birth, perhaps my own as the artist I was to become. And maybe that’s why I felt such a moment of power at the end of the dream, experiencing the potential of an artist to tap into the creative force that underlies the universe—because a personal renaissance lay just around the corner for me in California, though I didn’t know it—consciously—yet.