I must have been quite young when I first heard about dream catchers. As a kid it was comforting to believe that there was something that ensured that only good dreams came your way while bad ones slipped out. Someone had given me a dream catcher and I felt comforted having it hanging above my bed.
I soon grew up and the delicate dream catcher got lost as we moved from continent to continent and I forgot about it. It was only yesterday when I heard that Dear Popples was published that I suddenly remembered the dream catcher of my childhood.
The lore of the dream catcher is beautiful.
Long ago when the word was sound, an old Lakota spiritual leader was on a high mountain and had a vision. In his vision, Iktomi, the great trickster and searcher of wisdom, appeared in the form of a spider. Iktomi spoke to him in a sacred language. As he spoke, Iktomi the spider
took the elder's willow hoop which had feathers, horse hairs, beads and offerings on it and began to spin a web. He spoke of the cycles of life....how we begin as infants and move on to childhood, and then to adulthood. Finally, we go to old age where we must be taken care of once again as infants, thereby completing the life cycle.
Iktomi said, "In each time of life there are many forces and choices made that can affect the harmony of nature, and interfere with the Great Spirit and all of his wonderful teachings." Iktomi gave the web to the Lakota elder and said, "See, the web is a perfect circle but there is a hole in the center of the circle. If you believe in the Great Spirit, the web will catch your good dreams and ideas - - and the bad ones will go through the hole.
When I look back at the past few years I am sure that an invisible dream catcher hung over my life helping me make the right choices or how else would all that has come my way happen? But dream catchers are not just about choices and ideas; they are also about dreams. And though I hardly have dreams about myself, one seems to have got caught in some remote corner of the web: that of dear popples being published!
The Great Spirit thought otherwise and set his own wheel in motion and knowing that I would never find the time, the way, the force, the motivation to keep this dream alive, entrusted my dream to someone else. That was Abhigyan a true dream maker!
You do not thank Great Spirits and dream makers. You simply feel blessed that they came your way.