DREAMING OF SUSUN WEED

In my dream, Susun S. Weed was giving an all-day lecture at Brookdale Community College where I teach. I walked into a packed auditorium and people were taking a test. At the beginning of the dream I was wearing running shorts and no shirt, like I had just worked out or something, which I haven’t done in many years by the way.  I had come from my office at the college to the room where Susun was lecturing.

Susun teaching at her farm a few years ago.

[During my days as a live-out apprentice of Susun's, she would often come to me in my dreams to instruct me throughout the night; though I haven't had a dream with her in a long while, this recent encounter on the astral plane stood as as completely vivid and powerful and worth sharing. Susun was fond of saying she should be able to deduct her bedding costs from her taxes because she does so much work with her apprentices during dreams.]

 

Back to the dream at hand, it was a rather detailed test they were taking, many pages long, which I then attempted to take; however, I had missed the earlier lectures and I was trying to use any skills of inference to determine what I might have missed during the lectures to complete the test. I wasn’t nervous or angry, but I also realized I had missed too much of the earlier lectures to make any sense out of the test. Strangely, most people were having trouble with the test, as if they too had missed the lectures, and they were getting angry.

The auditorium was packed, mostly with women.

By the end of the process, they ganged up on Susun and were yelling at her, even calling her “Satan” because they felt she had given them a test they couldn’t pass; a woman in particular said, “You haven’t lectured enough! My son can’t pass this test!”

I had a telepathic thought that “Satan” to the crowd was defined by ambiguity or gray areas of interpretation. I then walked over to Susun and stood near her in case the crowd got too close. I wanted her to know quite literally I stood with her.

I looked at her and spoke, “Don’t you recognize me, I was one of your apprentices?” 

I removed my sunglasses and hat (for some reason I was wearing a wool hat and sunglasses indoors by this time in the dream), and she looked in my eyes and smiled. Her eyes were squinting and her pupils were tiny! She then went to address the angry mob.

She told them “before we worry about the answers, we should focus more on the questions. The quality of the questions we ask always shapes the answers—before we ever look for answers in this life, we must first be sure we are asking the best questions. You call me Satan because I refuse to give you questions with black and white answers.”

Perhaps, the metaphor in the dream was that life is a school, our experiences information and the people we interact with educators.

The “tests” we take (pretty much every choice we make, big or small) often seem like they are based on lectures we’ve forgotten or even missed entirely—I wondered could the lectures we’ve missed be like past lives we cannot remember or cannot remember easily—almost like each past life forgotten equates to a missed week of school for an elementary school student? Remember when you were sick in elementary school and you’d miss a week or even two with the flu? You felt like you missed years and years and had to spend all this energy catching up. 

We often blame the instructors (our fellow humans) or even the system itself (this matrix our energetic bodies temporarily call home) for our "failures," when in reality we need to address the quality of the questions we’re striving to answer because the answers are going to be different for everyone anyway, certainly not uniform. But again the answers will only be as good as the questions. 

Jean Houston, PhD, in the introduction to Susun's groundbreaking book The Wise Woman Herbal: Healing Wise writes: ". . .Susun engages us in learning to perceive health and wholeness as the essence of any condition and teaches the questions of 'how' and 'what' instead of 'why' as the real issues to ponder when seeking wisdom."

We’re far more likely to shape our reality by asking the right questions, deep questions, those that don’t allow for uniform answers but completely embrace our uniqueness.