"I am the sea-swell"

There has been a dreamlike quality to the last few months. Regular readers know my metaphor for this period of time: "facing the tsunamis," the big issues of my life that until now I was trying to skirt. I pulled my boat up onto a safe beach but didn't run for higher ground. I've simply dug my feet into the sand and waited for the waves to wash over me, so that I could finally see and feel them. My blog readership recently appears to have dropped. I understand. This hasn't been the easiest process, and I've only scratched the surface of writing about it.

Last week, I took a mystery out of the library called The Celtic Riddle, by Lyn Hamilton (Berkeley Publishing Group, 2000). The plot device is that legatees gathered for the reading of a man's will are handed envelopes containing clues to a larger treasure. It is soon discovered that these clues are lines from an ancient poem, "The Song of Amairgen" (or Amergin, with this translation by a Dr. Harry Roe). The first three lines electrified me: "I am the sea-swell. The furious wave. The roar of the sea."

I was immediately reminded that one way of approaching dream interpretation is to identify with all the people/objects in a dream. In the case of my current "dream," up until now, I've identified almost exclusively with the figure on the beach, waiting for each tsunami to come ashore, allowing it to either wash over me or, in a few cases, to send me tumbling into black holes in outer space. I have been courageous, but ultimately passive, referencing the tsunami's power, not sensing much in myself.

These lines of a poem, discovered serendipitously, opened up an entirely new realm of interpretive possibilities. What if "I am the sea-swell"? What if I am the result of an earthquake deep at the planet's core, and am the energetic wave moving out through the ocean, gathering size and power as it heads toward shore? What if rather than having been invisible and powerless all these years, I have been larger than life? What if people have been zig-zagging their small boats to avoid getting too close to me? What if people have been pulling their boats up on shore and running for the hills to outrun me? What if something in my life is actually so powerful and true that it could change people and landscapes? What if many of us seemingly "powerless ones" are actually tsunamis?

This particular dream interpretation is so mind-blowing, I'm just going to leave those queries out there. I need to let the ramifications of being (not facing) the tsunami sink in. "I am the sea-swell. The furious wave. The roar of the sea."