Glass Paperweight with Coral and Moon Cycle Intention Journal
A Nebulous Number of Days of Atomity and Memory
Wavelengths
Waves have flowed in and out of my life in unusual ways since I was young – sometimes in joyful ways and other times more ominously. I was born in a lake town and I’ve always loved the water, not surprisingly as I’m a Scorpio, a water sign. My mother often said that as a young girl, I was like a duck because she had such a hard time getting me away from water. So, I’ve always found it odd that at some point in my youth I started experiencing recurring tidal wave and tornado dreams. They weren’t frequent, but they were memorable because of the sense of dread I felt while dreaming and upon awakening. I always attributed the tornado dreams to having seen The Wizard of Oz at an impressionable young age, but the wave dreams were more of a puzzle.
My love of the water continued, nonetheless, and perhaps that‘s the reason one of the few items I have retained since I was young is a glass paperweight with delicate white coral preserved within it. Synchronistically, this paperweight was purchased when I went on an organized visit with a Hamilton-based Ukrainian youth organization to the Royal Ontario Museum when I was about twelve years old.
Like my wave dreams, I have no rational explanation for keeping the paperweight all the years between purchasing it and getting the job at the ROM. I had many different kinds of collections including an extensive one of Baccarat crystal animals, with which I parted decades ago. The crystal pieces were in many ways far more exquisite than the paperweight and definitely more valuable. Yet, I only held onto the common museum souvenir. Was I unconsciously clinging to it because of the sea creature’s affinity with water? Or was it some kind of harbinger of the fact that I would someday work at the Royal Ontario Museum and spend the greater part of my working career there?
Water never ceased to release me from its allure. From the lake town in which I was born, I moved to Canada’s largest city, also a lake ‘town.’ But at some point, my recurring wave dreams had stopped almost entirely and moved out of my consciousness. The first one I remembered having, in perhaps decades, occurred on Boxing Day night of 2004. It is ingrained in my memory because that was when the Indian Ocean tsunami wreaked havoc on fourteen countries and killed tens of thousands of people.
Being the holidays, I was with my then-partner’s family in wintry Gatineau and, at the closing of Boxing Day, we chose to watch Kevin Costner’s film Waterworld. It was a peculiar choice when I think back on it. Of all the movies in all the gin joints in the world, it makes no sense. It didn’t have a holiday theme, the film was nine years old, and all of us had previously seen the movie. But that’s what we screened. So, when we woke up the next morning to the news of the tsunami, I was rather unsettled, not only by the fact that we had just watched Waterworld, but also that I had had a tidal wave dream afterwards. I immediately chalked up the subject of the dream to the ‘suggestion’ from having watched the film, but when I casually brought up my dream in our post-Boxing-Day conversation, one of the other people in our group of about seven, and the only one I considered ‘aware,’ turned to me with astonishment and said she too had had a tidal wave dream.
As I used to often do, I dismissed everything to coincidence and went on with my life, forgot about the wave dreams again, until about 10 years ago when I saw the film Take Shelter. In it, a young family man has apocalyptic visions and is in turmoil about whether to shelter his family from a storm he imagines is imminent. The film’s final scene, which involves the approach of a super storm, has haunted me more than just about any movie ending I’ve ever seen, but after a decade, it too had slipped from my memory…until more recently.
In the summer of 2019, because of some worsening health issues, I started working with a new healer/energy practitioner with whom I had connected at a yoga conference to see if she might have some insights. Standard Western medicine in the form of blood tests and investigation was not showing anything out of the ordinary. But something was definitely out of balance – almost anything I ate was making me feel unwell. I was beginning to imagine I was an alien in an Earthling body and that my body wasn’t capable of processing Earthling food.
But there was also another sensation that was troubling me. I kept saying I had an inexplicable feeling that a wave was coming. It was the only wording I found to express the sense of dread that accompanied the way my body was feeling. And then, less than a year later, we were hit with the tsunami, known as The Pandemic, and I was soon guided to work with a new energy practitioner who, besides her one-on-one work, leads new moon intention circle groups. In less than a year, I have managed to eliminate 98% of the supplements as well as the thyroid medication I was taking, my habitual migraines stopped, and I’ve considerably increased my understanding of the pull of the sun and the moon and of the universe, in general, on our energy.
In the meantime, waves have continued in all of our lives. We didn’t call the first stage of The Pandemic the first wave, but that’s what it was. And since then, we’ve been smashed by a second wave…and a third. It may sound contradictory, but that ominous feeling I had of a wave coming dissipated after COVID hit, even though we keep getting pounded by the virus’s ebb and flow. I’m still on the brink of discovering how energy moves through my body and how it’s impacted by other energetic forces. But it’s been a compelling and sometimes mad ride since I first developed my attraction to water and began noticing the variation of waves that have touched my life through the decades.