Wheels Within Wheels

Dreams - Port o Alegre Workshop - 2003

This weekend workshop was especially precious to me. We were completely focused on Tara but did not have the added intensity of presenting a performance. We were able to go deeply into different aspects of the dharma behind the practice.

At the end of Saturday, I asked the women to imagine themselves when they went to bed nestling into their pillow as if it were Tara's lap and to ask her to come into their dreams. These three dreams that I will attempt to describe are related in such a powerful way to each other and to our current world preoccupation with the war in Iraq. They were told in Portuguese and I only hope that I have not distorted any important details. I am going to take the liberty of reporting them in the first person.

The first dream was Deborah's, a slender woman with black hair, large eyes, round glasses and a gentle slope to her shoulders. I was told that she is a retired psychiatrist.

" When I first went to sleep I was thrust into dreams of terrible violence. I was on a battlefield and it was dreadful. I woke horrified and I prayed to Tara to please help me to not have such terrible dreams, to give me a good dream. When I went back to sleep I dreamt that I was in a school room. I was a geography teacher and there was a map of Iraq on the wall. But when I went to describe the boundaries of the country the map began moving. There appeared under it another, much older map of Mesopotamia. The two maps kept melting and merging until to my horror they broke apart onto the floor. As I looked I saw that actually they had become pieces of a puzzle, a large puzzle and that now the room was filled with laughing children who picked up the pieces and put the puzzle together. We were all surprised to see that it was a completely new map that mixed the map of Mesapotania and the modern map of Iraq."

Marge is our dear friend who first organized our teaching in Porto Alegre in 1999. She came to the 2000 Tara and the Tarot Camp on Maui and has been directing a group of Tara Dancers every since. She is a powerhouse, with round laughing face framed by long, black electric wavy hair.

"I dreamt that I was with many of the people in this room, my Tara sisters, Prema and Anahata were with us. We were on a high mountain and we were looking down at a battlefield. It was terrible. We knew we must do something. We sort of flew down, over the field. We were pulling saris, like rainbow banners. As we pulled them over the dead and wounded bodies, they were transformed into beautiful, children."

Cynthia, a small dear yoga teacher, sitting next to Margie, suddenly recalled she too had a dream. She dreamt that she held two babies, one in each arm. Although her child is quite grown now, she felt at home being a mother to these two tiny ones. She was completely satisfied, with a tremendous sense of perfect accomplishment and well being.

Every death a rebirth. Every action, a re-action. The wheel turns. It has been turning for a very long time.