Angel Wings - Poem

My Blue Angel - Arifa Asariah

ANGEL WINGS

To those who have angel wings and many lives

I think of you as I fold my wings carefully into my back

(neatly tucked into the hidden crevices of skin)

I muse at the secrecy of wings

who shows theirs by day

and by night it's hard to see 

the fine mesh woven thread secret feathers

as we hover over dreams

taking respite from this one state of being

catching prismic truth and beauty

as it flows through

feasting on the flavour

tasting the freedom and movement in our hearts

angel singing to the sound of our own drum

eventually returning

to morning light

solid ground

traffic

birdsong

day

the fade in

fades out that knowing place

where we danced and flew 

on dream edged bliss

and we angel fall

fold our guilty wings back into ourselves

hidden in careful denial

for what are we taught about fallen angels

but that they are feared

as devils

Letters from my father from 'the other side'

Jesus & Mary and the Unformed Souls - Arifa Asariah

Dream Nov 2008

I was in a small study with a lovely old wooden writing desk.  On it I discovered letters from my father.  (In life my father died in 2001) I was upset that I hadn't read them, for he would be waiting for a response, I thought.  I opened the top one.

He wrote telling me where he was.  A beautiful countryside, he told me, and I saw it.  I saw what to me looked like beautiful Australian sub-tropics, like around Northern NSW, with rain forests and rivers; beautiful trees rising upwards, ferns around their bases and flowers of all colours.   As I looked on I realised this was not any countryside I knew, in many ways it was different from any I'd ever seen... in fact there was and 'alien' quality about it.

There was another letter I opened. In this one he was very upset.  It seems there was a baby that was born with something wrong with it and it hadn't thrived and had died.  He was so upset that as he was writing about it the writing was getting more wobbly until it wobbled off the paper... although I didn't know the child of whom he was talking, I felt very upset for his upset.

My father, in the first part of the dream, was showing me where he now was, after death.   There are stories that 'life' after this one, when we die from our material existence, is not dissimilar.  This dream is a confirmation for me of that.  But also, after my mother died, I dreamt that I saw her in a large, wide open field, leaning on a wooden fence, side by side with her father.  They both looked well and happy, as I remember.  That was all I saw.  Yet there it was, like this world of beautiful nature, two images of my parents in different but natural settings, much like this world.

In the second part of the dream, the second letter... there are many things I could say about the child.  My feeling is that it was a part of my father that didn't thrive.  He was, he told me, a very sensitive boy.  As he grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, son of Russian Jewish Immigrants living in 'The Gorbals', the toughest part of Glasgow, he didn't have the luxury of being the child he was; sensitive, psychic (which he was), and he became a tough, bullying, determined adult who managed to make his money and support his family out of poverty.  In the dream though, we both cried for the potential lost, of the child that could not thrive.  As I write this I am praying for this beautiful child within him, that he has been able to reunite with that part of himself in the world of natural beauty into which he has been 'deathed' from here.  

Father, our relationship was so hard.  I understand so much more clearly now that what you saw in me, of the sensitive and psychic parts, how much it hurt you.  I asked you once, when I was an adult, why you had been so tough with me... and you had told me then that you saw your sensitivity in me and didn't want me to suffer like you.  

I can smile now... but I spent years and years learning to forgive him for the hurt. But now I feel I understand his pain.  Oh my beloved father, I cried for your loss in my dreams, and now I cry in understanding.

Dead Husband In Head

Afternoon Siesta - Arifa Asariah

I lay resting, eyes closed, when he stepped into the daylight of my frontal lobe, swinging his left foot over my brow and sitting on my forehead; nonchalantly singing a short refrain from The Sound Of Music.

Eidelweiss, eidelweiss, la la la la la la....

It was tuneful, I'll give him that, but he had forgotten most of the words, so it lacked professionalism.  

But, I suddenly thought, why worry about that?  What really gets up my nose is his gross misappropriation of my head for his lounging area.  Who does he think he is?

My dead husband!  Well that was easy, he is, or was.

Hi, I begin tentatively.

Hi, back.  He says with a grin.

So, what's this all about?  What are you doing here?

Just loafing... Well, actually, I came to give you hope.

Hope?

It's been dark for sometime in our head.  Your senses are dim, your spirit lacklustre.  In fact you could say depression... but I won't.

Depression?  I thought I was...

... coping?

Yes.

Well, actually, you haven't been.  Surviving, yes.  Coping, hmmm, dubious.

Oh, that's news to me.

That's why I'm here.

News?

Yes.

Hope?

Exactly.

So give it to me... please.

Not quite yet.  First we need to tidy up your head a little more.  I've sent for the head-shrink and a couple of vodkas.

Head-shrink I understand, but I don't drink.

I do.

I laugh, you have to when your dead husband has a worse sense of humour dead than alive.  But it doesn't stop me thinking about what just went down.  Me - depressed?  I wouldn't have put it like that but, as I look around at my life and the energy it takes me to do half the things or less than I used to... and I guess I have to agree.

Good, he says in my head, honest appraisal is the first step to recovery.

He rubs his hands together, wipes a grin off his mouth, and, as I watch, two glasses of vodka, in rather beautiful v shaped glasses, hover in front of him.  He grabs one, downs it and repeats the process with the other one.  They disappear by bursting like bubbles into nothing.

...nothing like a good vodka and a fag. He says as if continuing a conversation. Immediately one appears, already lit in his mouth and he inhales deeply.

And it can't kill me.  He laughs gleefully, adding unnecessarily: Because I'm already dead.

I sigh.

I'm off for the mo.  But work on it.

what?

The head-shrink of course. I'll be back with hope.

With that he disappeared from view.

                                                     ..........

And that is what brought me here today.  I felt you, as a Jungian therapist, would perhaps understand.

Let The Arifa-Madness Begin

Dreamworld - by Arifa Asariah

Where do you go when you dream?  Where do you go when, night after night, sleep takes you into its arms and exhaustion forces you to comply?  

What kind of double life are we leading?  

Our daily conscious life... where we live, love, hate and do endless repetitive chores; like work or dishes or general daily tasks. Our conscious life that urges us to seek out more.  For some it is more pleasure.  For some more money.  For some more wisdom.  For some more loving kindness.  For some it's answers to the aching knowing inside that there is more to living and they seek spiritual awakening.

Our night life... where we enter a small death each time we sleep.  Where for some it is death of the conscious, no dream recall, no memory of where one goes, or doesn't go, in the hours of sleep.  For some there are dreams... rich tapestries of symbolism, strange worlds, nightmares and paradises abound or dreams that seem as normal at night as life is in the day. 

Who are we?  What are we doing here?  What happens when we sleep?  And in the small death of sleep are we experiencing, in any way, the final death?  If so... then what really occurs?

Hamlet... he wanted to kill himself, but wondered:

"To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause:..."

And now I sit and muse the similarities of sleep to death and wonder at the differences.

And I know what they are... for me, at any rate.  For I have looked at the face of death and I have slept.  I have slept thousands of times, and by the grace of destiny, looked also into the world of (what we think of as) death.  I know the difference now; like the one who swims for the first time, knows what to do, even though the more you learn to swim the better you get at it.

I'm going to talk about life and death here.  The unconscious and the conscious.  The spirit and the flesh.  The soul's journey through life-times and this one life in this body.
And anything else I feel like. 

So... this is my madness... 
Welcome.


Please feel free to tell me your experiences, dreams, realities, etc...