The tag on my tea yesterday read “Be Heard,” but let’s start back at that mountain from two nights ago. Part of me hoped I was done releasing, at least for awhile, after I woke on the morning of the March 11th. I had, after all, opened a door to let out the trapped energy of  fear. Naturally, when you go through a doorway (note the significance that this dream occurred early in the morning on the 11th), you need to deal with what’s inside. We never know quite what we’ll meet, or how long it will take to go through what we find.

So begins the journey that started with a single crow, perhaps the largest one I have ever seen, perched high in its glossy black cloak atop a bare tree as though waiting for me to pass by on my morning walk. The crow calls us to enter the darkness we hold inside, and through doing so create light from the shadows. It is a messenger of magic and the divine feminine energies that reside in all of us. There was one crow, I knew the job was mine alone.

Then the robin appeared beneath my apple tree, pecking the frozen ground to pull a treasure from the snow. The single crow, followed by the single robin, a messenger of spring, renewal and the birth, or rebirth, of one’s truth with its sky-blue eggs, told me this new phase was only just beginning.

I won’t deny that I had been feeling it. For the past few days I have literally felt as though I were pregnant. My lower abdomen felt achy and crampy, as women’s bellies often do in the early stages of pregnancy as the womb begins to adjust to new life. My lower chakras were, and still are, adjusting to that freed-up energy from two mornings ago. In fact, my entire body felt achy and tired.

The next night, after I dreamed of the mountain, I experienced a night of fitful sleep. I can’t tell you where I went in most of my dreams, my only memory of the first half of the night was waking to the message, healing, healing being played over and over inside my mind each time I woke before falling back into a restless slumber.

One dream, occurring again in the early hours of the morning, stayed with me. I was at Bowdoin, where I went to college. It’s perhaps worth noting that I last, physically, returned to Bowdoin for a reunion in the summer of 2011 (a doorway year). Right before, and during the time of the reunion, I came down with walking pneumonia and was quite ill, fatigued and feverish while I was back on campus with my family and the two friends I had stayed in touch with.

Can it be a coincidence that I dreamt of Bowdoin on the night of the 11th/12th? In my dream I was searching for comfort and peace, a space to freely express my truth, much like I had during my college years. I found myself in a dormitory with cluttered and dirty carpets, beyond which was a long room with a pristine polished wooden floor and organized, uncluttered furniture, but I needed to find a way to clean up the space I was in in order to get there. I walked into a large kitchen, like I had the night before on the mountain, only this time the cook opened an oven to reveal a large, pink, roasting pig. I was hungry, but this meal was not being cooked for me. Something was holding me back from partaking in the succulent feast that was being prepared.

Yesterday morning brought more fatigue and that strange pregnant feeling in my lower abdomen. I chose an Echinacea tea, and as I sat down to sip it, read the words “Be Heard” on the end of the string resting against my mug. Now, to be fair, Spirit had been trying to prepare me for this healing and release phase for quite some time. For weeks the repetition of signs kept appearing in various forms.

In her book The Hidden Power of Dreams, Denise Linn writes about learning to pay attention to messages that come in sets of threes, in particular. I had been seeing the number 3 for days, and had recently done 3 tarot readings for fellow healers/lightworkers that were eerily similar. Each querent, it became revealed, was, or had recently been dealing with, trapped fears in their lower 3 chakras. There was energy calling for, or being released in all cases. Denise Linn also tells her readers that the wounded healer draws to her what needs to be healed within herself, thus by healing this energy in others, she also heals herself. I have found this to be true in my own healing practice.

Now I’ll take you to last night. Although I was tired, I had trouble falling asleep. Perhaps it was the selenite crystal I had moved from the vanity beside the window and activated for dream healing before I went to bed. It had been a bold experiment. I had never before activated a selenite for dream work and placed it beside my bed.

I fell asleep sometime between midnight and 1:00 p.m., when I woke abruptly with my dream-voice calling for help, and filled with desperate fright. The dream began on the side of a road near my house. I was walking up a hill on my way home with my two dogs on leash beside me. Several construction/plow trucks were passing by on the left side of the road, I was on the right (the logical side of our bodies).  To prevent my dogs from attacking the trucks, I pulled the 3 of us over an embankment. Suddenly, I was struggling to hold on to the dogs, which were both orange in my dream, and the earth, so as not to fall down the steep ravine below.

Before I jump ahead to where I next found myself, let me draw your attention, as I did mine, to the time during which this dream occurred. Linn states in her book that the hours of 11 p.m to 1 a.m. are the gallbladder time according to the ancient Chinese clock. It is a time where we deal with unresolved, outwardly directed anger and test our courage.

After dangling from that cliff with my two, “loyal” dogs, I found myself home, inside what I knew to be my house (it appeared differently in the dream) with my family. I looked out the window and saw fire trucks and media vans pulling up the hill beside my home (again on the right side of me), and noticed a large white barn that was about to catch fire from my burning neighbor’s house.

I turned into rescue-mode and began gathering clothes, which are often symbolic of our outward appearances/coverings that hide our true selves, and blankets to bring over to help out. (Years ago I witnessed a fire in a neighboring apartment building and gathered clothing, etc. to donate). My husband went outside to investigate and I told my children to start getting ready for bed. Suddenly, our house turned into a Red Cross van (an overt symbol for healing, and since a vehicle often represents our bodies, this could be interrupted as a call for self-healing) and I could not get “upstairs” to my children, because there was no longer an upstairs, but a small, unreachable set of windows above me.

I began to panic, and looked out a lower window where I saw my husband on the hillside axing what I knew to be the remains of our house, which was what had actually burned. He was standing before a large pile in the shape of a teepee (I lived in a tepee for several months as a child), containing the  stacked remains of what we owned, encased in some of my shirts. One shirt, which was purple and stiff like it had been starched, stood out in particular. In her book Linn notes that an ax can be symbolic of the “fear of loss” and “cutting away that which isn’t needed.”

As I watched my husband, I could feel his devastation and anger. He was, like most people in our dreams, symbolic of my own shadowed fear. In the middle of the pile I knew was my old white computer, which contained all my work and writing. My manuscript, not yet published, was lost in the middle.

Along with the fear of losing my belongings and my creative work, I was now worried about our pets that I knew must have perished. I was filled with grief and helpless frustration. Yet, next to my husband, and the rubble of our house, there was a new, unfinished house wrapped extensively with plastic that was our new, unfinished home. Still, I was ravaged by my grief brought on by this fire, and woke to my struggle to express my emotions at 1 a.m. My body was feverish, my stomach upset, and the side of my big toe on my right foot was aching, an area associated with the throat and the thyroid. The word “mother” popped into my head.

It took me a long time to get back to sleep in those early morning hours as I thought about my dream and what it meant for me, trying to shed the fears it brought up as I did so. The sleep that came after was deep and restorative, I can’t tell you where I went, I don’t remember, but I woke without aches.

Again, I hoped I was done with the healing and release, but Spirit wasn’t quite finished with me. As if to make sure I’d gotten the message, the first part of my dream played out in the morning in slightly different form. I gathered up the dogs, as I always do on school days, and walked with my children and husband down the driveway to await the bus. I only made it half-way. Rosy, my orange-and-white dog, decided to lunge suddenly at a small animal, likely a cat or squirrel, pulling me in the process over an embankment of snow beside the driveway. I fell backwards and landed, not too graciously, on my right hand. It was a painful experience, to say the least.

Can you guess what I broke? My right, middle finger. The finger that holds our fire energy, which we house in our lower chakras. Message received!