A little blonde girl has shown up in my dreams repeatedly for years. I never connected all her appearances until recently when I began to read back through some dream journals and realized she’s been present in my dreams, off and on, for a such long time. I’m not even sure how far back, because my dream journals aren’t continuous but rather sporadic. Every now and then she shows up, always the same, a little blonde about four years old. Sometimes she takes an active part in the dream. Others she’s more of a bystander looking on, or a mysterious figure in the dream that I’m curious about. Some of the dreams she’s shown up in were premonitions. (I’ll have to share more about those in another post, another time.) I’ve wondered in the past if she were a child I’d have one day, or a project or concern that I needed to nurture along, maybe a more vulnerable aspect of myself, or perhaps even a spirit guide. Since I’m now past childbearing age, I know she’s not my own child-to-be

I got to thinking about her again this morning, and I decided to use the Faeries Oracle, by Brian Froud and Jessica Macbeth, to read about her. I drew three cards:

34 Sylvanius
13 Solus
19 The Sage

Then one more from the bottom as something hidden:

52 The Rarr

1) A part of me, the childlike, eager part always excited by new prospects, curious, dreaming how things will turn out. A part that often feels intimidated, a need to hide, sits behind the adult facade or mask the world sees.

2) A new development or turn in my life, something to nurture along and give my energy, imagination, attention, and effort.

3) A need to not control too tightly (the way adults do) but to allow something to mature at its own rate, to be patient rather than urgent, not to worry or force, but to nudge and contemplate it into something beautiful—through simplicity rather than complexity.

4) Energy—an energy that is quick, raw, sparkling, that arouses easily and is as soon dissipated. I need to earth myself, and take advantage of any wild energy burst while it’s here.

It’s amazing when you look more closely at your own back yard, how the place you consider ordinary can suddenly appear exotic and new. When we lived in a suburb of San Diego, my husband and I used to examine every insect, every bird, every weed we encountered in our yard. Once we saw what we thought was an earthworm, and on closer inspection it turned out to be a kind of salamander, with tiny legs and a face—all packaged up to seem to be an earthworm. What trick of adaptation caused it to take that form I’ll never know.

Seeing that reminded me to always look a little closer, to never assume I know any place, even my own back yard, as well as I could.

Ever heard of global dimming? Here are some links worth reading:

Contrails And The Dark Side

Dim Sun

Why the Sun seems to be ‘dimming’

Global Warming Could Mean Less Sunshine

One of the most interesting facts about solar dimming/global warming is that an important observation was made when all commercial flights over the US stopped during the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That pause in flights allowed scientists an opportunity to observe what happened to weather patterns without the contrails from so many aircraft in the atmosphere. I first learned of global dimming in a documentary that aired on PBS’s Nova. Here’s their transcript:

Dimming the Sun

Another documentary aired on UK television last year:

Global Dimming