In our culture, dreams are a world unto themselves.
Dreams inhabit that shadowy threshold space between waking and sleep, between our conscious lives and a deeper self, between this world and the one beyond. They are another means of illumination, small sharp shafts of light cast upon the darkened corners of our world.
Like the light itself, dreams do not always expose that which we need to see more clearly. Sometimes, they arrive in the form of visions, images of crystal clarity exposed like fine grains of sand shining in the light. Other times, they assume vaguer forms: casting an image in silhouette, throwing its shadow upon the sand in a whole new shape, as the sunset turns the crenellations of a colonial church into kiva steps descending into the earth itself.
We are entering a season of dreams and visions, one in which cultures the world mark threshold spaces and passages between the worlds. In days just past, we bade farewell to summer; the harvest lies ahead, a final few celebratory days before the snow flies.
This week, the Pueblo is preparing for the Feast of San Geronimo on Friday. The Tree of Life will have been erected in its usual corner of the plaza, awaiting the end-of-week festivities. The days are now demonstrably shorter, the light more sharply angled. The air remains warm through the middle of the day, but its edge is sharp. Dawn arrives tinged with frost; dusk comes wrapped in a fiery red-gold robe that, like changeable silk, fast shifts to chill blue-violet shades.
The land itself is preparing for slumber, wrapped and rapt in daydreams of winter.
For now, earth and air work in concert to stage their own celebration, their own ethereal feast day before the time comes to rest beneath winter’s white blanket. Their song is the soft susurration of the wind, their dance the whirling of the leaves, the long elegant interplay of light and shadow.
Together, they stage a show to that is the stuff of dreams and visions: the shapes of the spirits silhouetted starkly across the land, the mysterious lines and spaces between that hint at thresholds we cannot see although we someone feel their presence.
This is a week for visions, for navigating those spaces between . . . a week of dreams of shadow and light.
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