I am visiting Athena in New York City. We are in her apartment on the ground floor in an old neighborhood of brick and stucco buildings. I open the front door and look outside. The street is very narrow, like an alley, and since it isn’t wide enough for sidewalks, the door opens right onto the pavement. It is a quaint but grimy little area, which somehow manages a bit of charm despite all the hard surfaces and absolute lack of any exposed earth or plants.
In the living room, I see a large framed drawing hanging over the worn, yellowish velvety couch. It stands out strongly on the dingy violet-grey walls. It might be charcoal or watercolor or both, but it is composed entirely of dark grey lines, without any areas of color, and looks to be on high quality paper. It is as wide as the couch, but only maybe 18″ tall, giving it a very exaggerated horizontal format. Along the bottom is drawn a range of distant mountains; very far away because the horizon is so low. The rest is sky, composed of rather loose and energetic lines which appear to depict a massive jumble of clouds.
As I walk close to the right hand end of the drawing, I see it in a highly foreshortened view: The wide rectangle is nearly a square from this position. Then I see that this is a very unusual drawing. What looked like random cloud shapes viewed straight on from a distance clearly becomes the face of an old Native American or Mestizo woman when seen from this foreshortened perspective! The view is as if gazing upward from below the jawbone of a massive head, somewhat Mount Rushmore-like. She looks ancient, wise, and very strong. She wears a shawl over her head, and some beads or jewelry at her neck. I think this must be Grandmother, whom the Dreamer described in “Corn Woman Sings.”
Interpretation: On one major level, a divine being is announcing her presence to me. On another level, the dream depicts the current state of my spiritual development: I have learned to see the charm of the hard and narrow way that leads within, despite the grime and bleakness. Inside, things are getting pretty comfortable, and powerful Art depicts the grandeur of Nature, which is all the “God” I used to be able to conceive of, and all the “God” many will ever need. But it’s all in the way you look at it. From the right perspective, the face of divinity is revealed. Natural beauty is only the beginning of the spiritual realm, a signpost pointing the way to the divine.
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