This is how you use the magic medicine, she says. The new plastic bottle of amber liquid, covered from top to bottom with a white label full of black print. Now is a good time. There's a full moon in Czechoslovakia, so the time is right. I'll have to buy a little book that lists the positions of the planets throughout the year, so I will be able to know what times to choose to employ the medicine. She didn't even need to refer to a book.

You put this in your mouth. My tongue senses slippery and hard, two parts held together by delicate cord, one larger than the other, a solid but raw organ of some small animal. I'm embarrassed to have dead animal in my mouth, and I feel ashamed to have given up being vegan so easily. And you need to swallow it next to your address. Does she mean on the steps in front of where I live. Where is that. An apartment building with names typed in black on white paper next to an old-fashioned buzzer system with black buttons? Maybe if I write out my address and lie down near the paper. It's tough holding it in my mouth. I want to swallow. Do I wash it down with the liquid in the bottle. Oh, one half went down my throat. Salivating with the effort of not swallowing the larger part.

Do you feel that? she asks me. Her facial expression directs my attention behind me. I turn, still seated in the chair at the table I share with her, and see that the other woman is giving birth. Her question meant did I feel the glowing energy that she is able to sense radiating from the birth. I can't feel the energy the way she does, and it occurs to me that I could lie, oh sure I feel it, but I decide to simply not answer. Two men stand over the woman giving birth on the sofa, a father and brother. She makes the sounds of giving birth, but the pain doesn't sound as extreme as it usually is. After a few pushes, she makes a larger sound and her head arches back, her face contorted more in pleasure than in pain.

She's had the baby. That last push moved it out of her. She stands up from the sofa, smiling, and her blue granny dress covers her. There's no sign that she's just had a birth experience. Wow, I say to the woman who's giving me the medicine, how are you gonna top that? Because she's pregnant, too, and will give birth soon. And she will naturally feel the need to compete with the speed and ease of the birth we've just witnessed.

First Wrathful She-Khan and then Sonreído enter and stand near the table. WSK tells me that Sonreído has finished his opus. I'm moved and pleased. I look at his smiling, relieved face and think of his thirty hours a week of work and his twenty hours a week of refining the magical, transformative elements of his creation, and try to formulate something to say to him about how amazing it must be for him to have the fruits of his dedication, how hard he worked.

Then we're outside, walking on the grass near the cliff down to the water, and I'm explaining to WSK how to take the medicine with your address. Do I have some paper and a pen so that we can write down her address.

The Cape Lookout beach. No sun. No source of light. Grey above and below. Dark and light shades of grey. I can't see the ocean. Under my feet, packed, flat sand. Ridges of pebbles and rocks. I hear the ocean over an incline. There is nothing but shadowy air, dark coarse sand, ribbons of small and large stones, the sound of the ocean. No seaweed, no plants, no garbage, no objects.

Was that where the sandy cliff and grasses were when I camped here for my birthday last summer? The winter storms hadn't yet washed the land barrier away. There was a cliff face then. I stood on it and looked down at the beach full of people. I walked down the steep walkway to the warm sand.

In this absence of light, I see a group of four or five people walking. One woman has a bandanna on her head, like in an old photograph of my mother on a windy beach in the early sixties. She's part of a group walking towards the water. Far ahead and far behind them are other groups.

I get closer, to the top of the low incline. The ocean is on the other side. It is wearing down everything. It has worn down everything. The land barrier was once here. Dark sand, dark pebbles, black rocks. The ocean churns. I walk north, in the direction we walked on our real world visit in the winter. The campground has all been worn away. The ocean has poured down night tides. The ocean has flowed over this small ridge. The ocean has flooded what was the campground.

I don't think I've seen it like this in sunlight and now it's all dark. I don't think it is night. It is neither night nor day. All is darkening. All is shading into black. Shiny black rocks rolling in the surf, smaller black rocks above that, coarse sand above that.

I walk along the surf. What I can see becomes thick, until the greyness everywhere is almost opaque. There is almost no difference between what would be the sky, if sky existed, and what would be ocean and land.



I wake up within the dream. there is a part of me that is very strong, very cold, very decisive, who says this is not a good idea. This is too strong, this is too cold. This is too dark. I am deciding to end this. It is not right. The iron will grey stone strength inside me is worried about my safety, but I don't worry because I am strong, I extend everywhere, I am relentless. An identity is surfacing from me. This will happen. It is this strong part of me. The stone grey part of me. That says: no.



I open one eye in the dream and see my bedroom in black and white. It is different, my visual perspective is not from where I am sleeping on the bed. A shade is open and some light comes through a curtain. My dream self sees my room in black and white from outside my body.



I woke up enough to know I had an alarm set to go off in twenty minutes. I went back to sleep. And I think then was when I had this following dream.




I am someone who might be someone like me or someone like la artista, walking along a small ledge along a stone wall or incline and above a river. I walk along what starts out as a pathway three times. Each time the path grows more and more narrow and then disappears into the stone wall. The third time, I look up and see that the real path is at the top of the wall on my right. I get it that I chose the low road, the easy path, not wanting to go up the hill, but that to continue along the river I have to go back once again and take the high road.



~~~~~~~~~

Death, loss, depression, and the strength that comes from having experienced sadness and grief. The ability to explore the underworld. The strength to look into the dark, to inhabit the dark. A gift to bring back to the world of light.