Reversing – Individual and Communal
I have a book to recommend: The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan. It’s about the Dustbowl Era – the nightmare on top of the nightmare during the Great Depression wherein homesteaders in the heartland, who subsisted on farming, were brought to ruin. I feel curious writing this sentence because it sounds as if these folks were tragic victims. Perhaps. But as one reads the book, it is less about victims and more about a natural disaster directly caused by humans… and directly related to the great machineries of Wall Street and Washington that also led to the Depression. As such, it offers an important dreaming lesson.
I grew up in the Dustbowl area, two generations later. In fact, there’s even an entire chapter devoted to my small, remote Panhandle town, Dalhart. As a child I heard all the stories – days when one would look to the horizon and see a wall of black churning down on the farm, and rush to wet sheets and towels to cover the windows and doors in order to breathe inside while they weathered the storm. Stories about darkness at noontime, and cattle lost in the driving sand, walking over fences that were now buried in dunes and finally dying from lungs too filled with dirt for them to breathe. And I saw the pictures – sitting next to my grandmother going through the cardboard box of our family’s history. Listening to the old-timers, I grew up believing the Dustbowl was nature at its meanest – that life can turn on a dime, with natural disasters a constant threat to a person’s survival.
And then, thirty years later I read this book.
Mr. Egan paints a different picture of the Dustbowl, and to do so he steps back to a time before the madness started. It was a time when Cherokee, and other tribes, roamed the millions and millions of acres of natural grassland we call the Heartland, following the buffalo – the giant herbivores of the plains who were perfectly suited to eating the grass. For over ten thousand years this symbiotic ecosystem existed: in an arid land with less than 20 inches of rainfall a year, wherein hail, tornados, wind and drought were commonplace, the hardy grass held the soil in place, flourished despite the challenges of the weather, and provided a renewable food chain for land, animal, and human. Then came industry, the stock market, capitalism, and Manifest Destiny.
In about 50 years time that 10,000 year old ecosystem was destroyed: the Cherokee were cheated and run off, two Homestead acts promised riches for adventurous settlers, and grassland was upturned to plant commercial wheat crops. Just three seasons later the world economy crashed, wheat prices dropped, and the newcomer farmers left the land barren. Without grass to hold it down, the soil became mobile – missile fodder for the driving winds that characterize the area. Thus, the Dustbowl. An event that even dropped several million tons of dirt on Chicago, and as far away as New York City and Washington DC, even pelting ships over 200 miles out to sea.
What does this have to do with dreaming?
The story told by Egan is the other side – it is the perspective of the stepped-back. As a child I heard the story of the Dustbowl only from the perspective of the victim, trapped in the linear perspective of the right-then. It was Story – collective and individual. It was stuck in the pain of it, a pain in the past lived in the present because it wasn’t yet healed. Egan steps out of the linear and reverses to the before the story, stepping above, looking below, and around all sides, to present other views. This is the gift of dreaming.
Dreaming shows us the “other story” of our waking lives – the parts we didn’t pick up as we paid attention to the linear duties of our regular daily lives marching from dawn to dusk. The parts that keep us enthralled until we heal the pain of them. Like Egan’s book, dreaming is a mirror that reflects back the deeper aspects of our lives presenting us with different choices through new perspectives. If our Story is that of victim, dreaming shows us something else and therefore is our way out of a stuck story and into creation.
Egan’s book also shows the resilience of patterns. I couldn’t help but think, as I read the lessons in the pages, that nothing was learned. Today that land is farmed every more ferociously by commercial agriculture. Then, President Hoover said a man wasn’t worth much if he hasn’t yet made a million dollars; today, Presidential candidate Romney intoned something similar with his 40% comment. Then, conservationists warned of the depletion of the only underground water source there and urged renewable agriculture; today, that same water source is dropping precipitously as irrigated farms still hold king. By dreaming, as with Egan’s book, we can look above our right now and see behaviors we’ve been repeating, patterns that hold us in their clutches. And, like Egan, we can reverse on them, to untangle and be free. This holds for both our individual lives and dreams, as well as the collective.
The practice of Reversing is one of the seminal, daily practices of the work I teach. Here is a short YouTube video explaining how.
