The Gift of Dreams
by Tavi Lorelle Carpenter
I’ve started reading Enough For All, as someone who has interest in food sovereignty, food accessibility and food in general, it seemed like a great fit for this change from summer into fall.
So far I’ve already been drawn in by Kathleen Smith’s beautiful story telling of her family’s history.
However, the lack of knowledge I have of my own is painfully mirrored back at me.
And it’s not like I don’t know anything, there is a lot I do know
But for as long as I can remember, the story of our family has always come to me like waves washing across the sand. The ebb and flow of a story that is hard to tell and hard to hear. In the words of my Grandmother: “sometimes things happen in life”.
And those things can hurt.
But pain intermixed with the joyous laughter and love filled homes have taught me to trust in the undeniable truth that like a well woven basket, my ancestors are tightly knitted into the tapestry of my life.
I know this to be true because they come to me when I need them most.
Last summer, just before I was to start my final year of college, I had a dream that can finally be shared. I was in the midst of my research, interviews well underway. I was staying at my Auntie’s in her beautiful pink room decorated with a million paintings and small trinkets. Little comforts to soothe an overactive imagination.
I don’t dream very often.
I don’t think I sleep enough to dream.
But when I do dream, they have a way of staying with me.
Sticking to my mind like it’s been tacked down with rubber cement.
One night, as I slept, I was set upon high bluffs standing over an emerald ocean with the light dancing across the surface creating elusive diamonds shining up at me. The earth under my feet felt soft and grainy as I looked around seemingly alone. Purple coastal flowers waved to me as the sun kissed my shoulders, a cerulean blue sky, clear of clouds, stretched high above me. I became conscious of the fact that I was on a trail leading somewhere familiar and yet unknown. I started to journey down the path when I noticed billowing white clouds had appeared on the horizon. I stopped and stood, watching as these clouds slowly came into focus. They were old-timey sails on ships familiar to me only through Pirates of the Caribbean
I felt something to my left, more of a feeling than a sensation-turning my head, my eyes widened in shock as skeletons with bones darkened by decades of time, came running right at me. I turned to get away and the earth gripped my feet, as the skeletons ran past. One turned to me and from its hollow sockets, stared straight into my soul.
A silent scream erupted from its skeletal mouth.
I closed my eyes and when I opened them, I was back in my Auntie’s room, daylight breaking through the window.
When I’ve shared this dream before, I’ve often heard in response, “how creepy”. But I wasn’t afraid of the skeletons, they were not strangers to me. Though I don’t think I’d know them if we met outside of my dream.
The fear I felt was not mine but theirs.
For a long time, I assumed this dream was some bizarre way my brain was processing my research. A strange little insight into a time when the trauma of colonialism had yet to anchor into our homelands.
It would take me months to understand the deeper meaning of my dream. Like a bad break-up, the lesson only became clear after gently tumbling through my mind.
I realized that in spite of the fear or panic that surrounded me, the skies never lost their vibrant color, nor did the scenery shift. The beautiful setting of my dream never changed, in fact if anything, the land held on to me, keeping me in place. I see it as being this reminder that the story of my people, of my family, and of myself, will always go back to the land.
But I still think about how my family wasn’t as lucky as other families. The way the fate of this country crushed upon our line, to a degree wherein our full story will always be a little unknown.
So here I sit drinking an overpriced cold brew and listening to the rush of cars go by. If I close my eyes I can trade in the city streets for tall bay laurels, transporting me back to my grandmother’s land where the rural highway almost sounds the same.
I picture a time when our lineage will be healed, when this season of colonialism will come to a close. It’s a future I don’t expect to see. But I work on healing for those I won’t know in life, just as my ancestors did for me.
I am grateful to be in the process of it.
The heaviness has taught me to love in a way lightness never could.
Heaviness illuminating the importance and sacredness of inter-generational healing.
This piece was reported and written with the support of an Ethnic Media Outreach Grant, made possible by the Stop the Hate initiative, funded by the California State Library (CSL) in partnership with the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs (CAPIAA). To learn more about Stop the Hate or to report a hate incident, visit stopthehateca.org.
