When visions explode! Dark stars, explosions, symbols, and getting kicked out of your own vision: Rally thoughts, Part Two

In Part One of my post-Rally thoughts, I talked about the awesomeness and the powerful post-Shiva Nata visions.

But there were also visions so powerful they were a little scary. So Part Two is about exactly that.

Havi said that Shiva Nata tends to give you the thing you need. Keep that in mind. All this weirdness, and it was something I needed. Apparently.

Here’s what I wrote down about my strange post-Shiva Nata vision at Rally:

The neuronal sticky mass-y ball     black tar strings fuzzy sticky     dark, messy       quiet, humming      powerful      blocking, loud      confusion, obstinate     made of sticky fuzzy yarn dipped in tar. Huge fat strands.

And it looked like if you mashed these things together:

I called it the Dark Something.

Kind of freaky, right?

That was the vision I had. I didn’t know what it was, but it was there.

But then it was time to free-write and visit the landscape of our Projects, so I tried to do that instead. At some point I wrote:

Feels like something is blocking my sight this morning. Not clear but murky, slowed. So resistant.

Gee, I wonder what was causing that? Oh, perhaps that GIANT SCARY BLACK BALL OF ATOMIC YARN that showed up? I kept trying to write, but my nice peaceful landscape freewrite turned into a nasty little spat:

What does this landscape need? [Havi’s gentle question that started us off]

Maybe I don’t need you!

Okay, moving on…what resources are here?

Well, none if you don’t want them!

Come on, don’t be like that.

Leave me alone!

You know, you can just sit here if you need to. Or maybe I won’t visit Project Land. I could shut you up.

Don’t be threatening.

Come on.

Stop saying that!

And here is where I wrote in huge black letters across the page:

TRUCE.

TEMPORARY STAY OF HOSTILITIES.

END TRANSMISSION.

I closed my eyes to try to figure out what was going on. Here is what I saw: I found myself outside a closed door. Kicked out of my own vision.

The door was the only opening visible for miles in a vast, curving, blank wall. No way to climb it. The ground was barren and dusty. The wind was whistling through. It was kind of lonely. Not where I wanted to be. Here is the conversation I transcribed with myself about it:

Me: What happened here?

A voice says: Conflict. Someone got hurt. It’s not safe in there right now.

Me: Who’s here with me?

(I looked around and saw one tired child, holding an empty wheelbarrow. I saw the wall with a closed door. And I saw a guard.)

Me: Can we talk?

(Everyone is very quiet, avoiding my eyes.)

Me: Well, I’ll start. I’d love to visit Project Land today. I thought we had such a good time yesterday!

(More silence)

…Ah, I see. Not everyone agrees.

Little one, what’s your wheelbarrow for?

Child (in a mournful voice): I don’t know. It’s empty!

Me: that’s okay. Is it because you’re tired of carrying things or because you ran out of stuff?

Child (distressed): I don’t know!

Guard: Hey, leave the kid alone!

(The wall begins rumbling in an ominous way.)

Child (still distressed): I wanna go in there!

Me: Me too, kiddo. Do you know what we need to open the door?

Child (defiant): No.

Me: Guard, do you know?

Guard (looking uncomfortable): Miss, we heard of a rampaging sticky ball. Fights started because no one knew what it was.

Me: Ah.  I think I know that ball. Well, do we know what it wants?

Guard: Not really.

Me: Is it mad?

Guard: Not exactly. But it doesn’t want to be moved or pushed around.

Kiddo: That’s why my wheelbarrow is empty! I’m tired of pushing it around!

Me: Well, I promise this time we won’t push it. But what if we try talking to it?

Kiddo: No! It doesn’t like that either.

Me: Okay, we won’t do that. So we can’t move it, can’t fight it, can’t talk to it…can we give it a good place to live, in Project Land?

Kiddo: Okay. But we can’t forget it’s there! It doesn’t like to be ignored.

Me: That makes sense. Let’s let it rest while we do our own thing for a while, then.

(Good sounds and movement from behind the door!)

Guard: Miss, the door is going to open soon.

Me: Okay…we’d better get ready!

(Door bursts with light, opens.)

Wow. So what was that all about?

This is a really tricky one. It has a lot of layers to it. The child (I think) was my creative, imaginative self, who was trying desperately to stay with the light, playful tone of Rally and on Wednesday couldn’t keep up anymore. I was bone-tired and confused from Shiva Nata, and my vision turned all this into a palpable, throbbing block of energy in front of me.

Whenever I tried to understand what the Dark Something was, all I could think was that it was sapping my energy just looking at it.

I wrote some more on that day, trying to let the Dark Something rest, but after lunch I found myself wanting to retreat into the Playground’s Refueling Station. I needed to know what the hell was going on. I realized I thought the object was sapping my energy, but in reality it was all my energy. This was still confusing, so I tried another interview:

All your energy. Interesting. So what does that mean?

I need permission to stop resisting. To be tired.

Good.

Do you think it will change soon–the Dark Something?

That depends. Do you need it to?

I feel like I’m supposed to have something brilliant happen. Soon.

Really. And you can’t be brilliant without all the energy that’s in the Dark Something?

I guess I don’t know that.

Good work staying with good possibilities! I think you know something else…

I’m getting that the good bigness will come out of the dark something. Or that’s what it might become.

And then–AND THEN. A quintessential moment of the goodness and truly unpredictable weirdness that is Rally: at this precise moment, out in the main room, my fellow Rallyites were whooping and hollering it up in a spontaneous, joyful victory dance to help someone celebrate. I heard this beautiful bubble of laughing sounds and joy rise up, and so at that exact moment I let the sound of it pour into the Dark Something.

(I know this is on the edge of woo-woo craziness. I know. I did it anyway.)

The Dark Something exploded. It looked kind of like this for a moment:

And then, quite peacefully, it turned into something like this:

‘

(a.k.a. Titan, largest moon of Saturn)

And this was so very mind-blowingly weird and unexpected and confusing that I spent some of the rest of my day just drawing a big weird orange ball in my artbook. And coloring it in. And then even deeper. With more colors inside the orange — yellows, reds, browns, whites, other yellows, other oranges. Deeper and deeper until it was the perfect thick, luscious, deep orange color of my vision.

As I wrote, I thought about orange. I thought about what it might mean, symbolically. Orange is a lovely firey color, bright and inspiring and warm, but what else? I made a mental note to ask at the afternoon Chicken about what Chakra orange represented, because I know Chakras are important to Havi and maybe there was something else I was supposed to learn.

Oh, orange Chakra. Boy did I learn about you:

Orange is the color of the second chakra (Svadisthana) and relates to: creativity. Reproduction. Emotional identity. Sexual and reproductive energy. It is the body’s “communication to the Being inside, about what the body wants and needs, and what it finds pleasurable“; it balances “harmony, passion, freedom, intuition, and expression of emotions.”

Svadisthana means the dwelling place of the Self.

Eeeenteresting.

Without saying too much, one layer of what happened was that my lady parts were about to, um, burst forth with their own message, if you know what I mean. That was cool, sure, in an email-from-my-inner-organs kind of way. But that is only one part of it:

What happened was that I spent time with my creative self. I went to where that self lives, quite literally. And I found the giant block that lives there.

That block is hugely connected to: my chronic back pain; my confusion about my creative identity; self esteem. It’s connected to: everything that has happened since giving birth to my daughter. And other big things I can’t quite name in this space.

Maybe I will write more about some of these things in the future. Some of them are a little too close to my heart to reveal yet.

What’s kind of crazy to me is not that My Chakra Spoke To Meeeeeee — because you know, I’m not entirely certain I believe in chakras? Not to disrespect them — but! I do know that some things aligned and in some kind of body-mind way these were the themes that bubbled up and wanted to be heard, desperately: Creativity. Figuring out identity. Give and take and fluidity and openness.

That was the big message that I took out of Rally that I’m still figuring out. On the one hand, I wrote a ton of stuff and created a nice little bridge to doing it again. But there were bigger connections and themes and thoughts that I discovered. My back pain and my sex life and my creative self and my writing practice are all tied up together. Working on any one of them means working on all of them. Taking care of all those things.

On one hand, this is immensely freeing. Just like at Rally — all roads lead to Rome.

(And again, as Havi said: Shiva Nata gives you the thing you need. Maybe not the thing you want, but the thing you need.)

Right — immensely freeing — but on the other hand, terrifying. I can tell already that I am scared and not quite ready to untangle all these threads in the Dark Something (or the Orange Ball It Turned Into)  and give them love and understanding. It’s okay to be here, it’s okay to be scared. Be scared and know that it’s too late to back out: Rally started the ball rolling (and exploding!) and I can only go forward from here.