Dream of Kali

Early this morning, I dreamed a vivid dream of performance art. I was in school and painted a large image of Kali on a clay slab, but I couldn’t find a place to hang it. Finally I placed it in the middle of a dirt road going through a field, and I scooped out the sandy soil to create basins and mounds around it, with some ancient symbols of Ireland drawn into the mounds. A path led you into it and out, with the painting of Kali on the ground inside.

I heard a couple of teachers complaining about the ugly structure that had appeared overnight in the field, so I led all the students and teachers in a line to walk through it. I didn’t explain. I marched like a soldier about ten feet ahead of the line, and I may have been dressed like a general.

After leading the way through I went back to the school without stopping, without explaining the installation, did whatever, then I walked into the lobby of the building, where the people who were in line were drifting in. There was a table with a sign with a petition to remove my art installation, and a couple of sour faced women standing to the side of it. Underneath the petition to remove it, someone had added an area to sign in support of it. The signatures in that area slightly outnumbered the signatures who wanted to remove it. All were women.

I said to the women, did you realize that it is only sand and clay and after a couple of hard rainstorms nature will destroy it for you? They stood like stone.

I had gone to sleep thinking of chaos. Of the many consequences of the reversal of Roe vs. Wade, including the news that some pharmacists are refusing to prescribe methotrexate because it can be used to induce abortion. Methotrexate is one of the few known effective treatments for my husband’s rare auto-immune disease, polymyositis, and it is prescribed for other auto-immune diseases as well. It works well for him and it is keeping this incurable muscle disease in check.