Yesterday I sprinkled a carrier bag full of coffee grinds (I got for free, from a coffee shop at the local hospital) onto my compost heap. Wow, it smelt so divine. I could type more about the positiveness of doing that for the garden, but all I’ve got in mind now is “Mmmmmm thank you coffeee” as that’s also because I drink a cup of coffee of a morning and it is at hand. Today it is as a salve to my strange and upsetting dream. Yet some of the contents of the dream could have easily been predicted to become the subjects of it.
I dreamt: There was something like a sea or a river of sorts. I think I was clinging onto edges and then walking up into a place where it was something similar to a field next to a garden centre. There was a stair up to a bridge, but that as I got on it was wobbly. As I climbed up, I realised there was a really old man upon it behind me too. He was carrying a stick to balance himself and the structure wobbled a lot with his unbalanced movements. I could see ahead that the latter part of this structure started to look like it was the top of a metal farm gate. Yes, it was a metal farm gate, just the gate. Then the man rushed as if he really needing to get across right away as everything seemed to be just darkness and just the gate ahead of him. I wanted to help steady him, but then he just leaped and landed somewhere on the ground of the darkness and was gone. Then it seemed I was somehow stepping off the top of the gate into light and air and a garden centre. There was a little coffee shop ahead, where a sign read something to do with reading your palm for free. I sort of went along with it and the lady (who gradually started to look like someone I vaguely knew who in real life did an official type job) did the reading, then pointed across to a younger woman where I was to sit down. The young woman was rough looking and was colouring in a drawing of letters and numbers, that I think the older woman had made. Then the younger woman indicated that it was to become a tattoo on my arm! WTF? I wasn’t keen to say the least on this letters and numbers thing tattooed onto my arm, coloured in or not! Just then and thankfully, another person pushed in to get theirs done and I quietly walked away. One of my children called me over and said I needed to complain. So we joined forces to try to find the older woman and eventually saw her sitting with other people around a table drinking coffee. All of them I thought I knew (again vaguely). I didn’t want to complain, because even then in the dream state, I realised how I was just glad not to have a tattoo done and didn’t want to be noticed getting away.
Then I woke to a cup of coffee made next to me on my bedside cupboard. I’ve pulled the laptop over onto the bed to write this before it fades and to ponder this story. You see, recently I’ve watched a few harrowing holocaust documentaries of late. Therefore, you can guess how I now know more in my heart of why my beloved, gentle, very private and yet sometimes (and for no apparent reason) fiercely adamant Father (who was an officer in the navy during WW2) that never wanted me to ever have a tattoo! I can see so much more now in my minds eye the why. How terrifying it must have been for the people rounded up and so disheartening to have been betrayed by those you knew. Plus, there’s also that I recall camping out years ago with my own young family, as the camp site was hit by a neo-nazi group running amok. Thankfully our tent was nondescript and didn’t have nationalistic flags on it. Plus we’d travelled via the ferry and then train, for cars without local numbers or the nations plates on were hit and buildings a the site damaged. My children slept through it just as they had the noise of the couple bonking away all evening, but that I heard so much destruction going on and stayed alert. I know how close I came to being the violence that I hate. For it would have been natural to try to protect my family, unlike a lot of unnatural hate that is still being stirred up in the hearts of young people. We all need to show how to be peaceful to the young, to show how to be creative and not destructive, show how to live compassionately. I’m not religious, but do I hear an “amen!”?
Over Soil 