This past December I had a dream of a man standing with a very-pregnant woman. Her water breaks, and in this gushing river fish swim–many fish splashing in this prelude to birth. It was a simple dream, but one stocked with archetypal symbols and meanings of the Advent season. Then came the urge to paint in my sketch book, one image, then another. I’d go to sleep and wake up with yet another image. Another followed, then again, another. Finally, I thought I was through all the fish painting and then, in a session of unplanned intuitive art making, music notes on a piece of collage paper reminded me of a woman’s eyes. Fish Lady emerged. A fish jumped into her arms, a glorious fish with golden fins and scales. I asked her what all this was about, and she told me. This blog post is a storybook of images and lessons learned.
Yesterday, I started another painting…of a train from my childhood, the Little Engine that Could. Next to the track there is a stream. I was getting ready to pack up my paints for the day…a fish breached tissue-paper water.
Fish Lady Speaks
Fish Lady: I stand at the crossing between what you know and what you don’t. Don’t you like the gift I am bringing to you? It is a beautiful fish, at first pencil drawn then all blue, the color of the sky and the sea, all the fluidity of the outer and the inner, your daily mind in retirement that flows from one thing to the next without plan or methodology unless you are cooking a new recipe or learning a new lesson about how to paint shadows. Because the fish’s scales are gold tells that it is from God and needs to be eaten and consumed, digested and made part of your wholeness.
Me: But it is beautiful, Fish Lady! If I cook and eat it, it will be destroyed. I do not like that. I want to watch its beauty swim in my awareness.
Fish Lady: That is your need to keep things certain and in one form. But this gift allows all that beauty to go into your core, just as it is now hugged against my heart. I know that the physical act of eating no longer brings you the pleasure that it once did now that your taste buds are dull and confused, but maybe this is a call to eat of the spirit.
Me: I am aware that Jesus and fish are associated; if this is a call to buy the Jesus of religion and eat it completely, I am afraid that the bones will stick in my throat. It has always silenced me.
Fish Lady: You are stuck in the old stories and need to digest the beauty to become the beauty. The stories of Jesus you remember from childhood when he was all goodness and light even in the face of death, these are stories that float like beautiful clouds in the sky that produce the rain that becomes the sea that you find yourself in swimming with the fish that are now the gifts of mystery. Watching childhood stories, like watching the action in an aquarium, may calm but not sustain you in what you are doing now. You must slit the fish in its belly, pull out its innards, filet it, throw it into the fire, and eat it. That means finding Jesus in the missingness of taste you used to revel in, the pains in your face and joints, the cake you bring to your new neighbors, the squirrel on the back deck you fed with peanut butter, the conversation with the kid down the street who shoveled your walk who looks like a linebacker and wants to become a clothes designer, a visual, walking contradiction whose dreams you can support. You see God through curious attending to both mundanity and magnificence.
Me: And like the initial dream of the fish swimming in the water breaking before the pain of labor and the joy of birth, the work of dailiness is the catching, gutting, cooking, eating and digesting, avoiding the bones when I can. I am not sure I can.
Fish Lady: Yet you also dreamt one night of can openers. But can is not just a noun; it is a verb too. You are being invited to open your fears and have dinner…Take another look at my image. Did you notice that the only piece of collage visible still beneath the paint is the dictionary page. Dictionaries give definitions and meaning. Definition and meaning. There is more here to look for. Pay attention!
Memorizing the Laws of Gravity 