a big, clean river
my dream about water
Last night I was sleeping next to B and I dreamt about a university (again). I often dream about a university. Always it is beautiful and everyone is filled with joy, and of course, knowledge. The students know each other and laugh. The campus is expansive, always, and I am never a student but I long to be.
Last night, I was just visiting, of course. I walked along winding pathways between buildings to which I did not have keycard access. Through the middle of the campus ran a river, wider than stream. The water was clear; I could see all the way to the pebbled bottom. The river oxbowed, and where the turn was sharpest, the water moved fast. Next to the river were the students (there are always students) and they were seated at a long wooden table, talking to one another. They were having a meal of brown bread, sharp cheese, and a big piece of meat. While they ate and laughed, they talked about the farm where the meat came from.
It both delights and breaks my heart, especially upon waking, the beauty of my dreams. Laughing and eating brown bread and hard cheese by a cold, clear river is what my brain (my soul) (the earth’s soul) gave to me to represent beauty, and it worked. I had that hard, sharp heart pain when I woke, the sense of not belonging in that beautiful place, rejected by the institution who owned the oxbow.
I experience (receive) a lot of dreams. I think there was a time in the past when dreaming about the university again would evoke irritation, agony, embarrassment. Am I really still so caught up on college? But this morning, my reaction was different. I feel that dreams use images that have a potent effect on us to draw attention somewhere. Something in myself is wanting to talk about belonging, education, prestige & validity. There’s a story underneath what I’ve been feeling day-to-day about work and the future. Something needs attention there, and it called out cold and clear.
A few months ago, I went to a day long workshop with the self-described rogue economist Della Duncan. Della teaches about alternative economies, how we might imagine our world outside of (after) capitalism, as well as Joanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects. She also coincidentally went to a grad school I think about a lot, Schumacher College. At the workshop I attended with her this past winter, she asked the question: What if the health of our economy was measured not by GDP and instead by how clean and potable our rivers are?
To drinkable rivers.1
Upon writing this, I learned about an Canadian nonprofit called Drinkable Rivers whose goal is exactly this.
https://drinkablerivers.org/