Meeting the Great Mother: Notes from Summer 1999

The overnight ferry from Naxos to Samos was packed when we boarded around 11:30pm. I didn't know how we would find a space to sleep. People were sprawled everywhere. Bob carved out four seats for us and I tried to sleep on the floor in front of the seats, building up mountains of backpacks and towels into a makeshift mattress. The air was stale with the smoke of hundreds of cigarettes. The hardest thing for me to handle while traveling in Greece was the smell of putrid smoke.


I must have drifted off at some point because I awoke from a deep sleep with Bob shaking me, "Stop it Jen...stop."
"What? What are you talking about?"
"You're dreaming...You keep yelling 'Mommy! Mommy!' "
"Nuh huh."
"Yes you are."

Usually when you are awoken from a dream you remember some fragment - but I had no recollection of any of it. There was no way I could have screamed out for Mommy. It just didn't fit. I was 30 years old traveling with my partner to Turkey from the Greek Islands. Bob was adamant about my screams. As I sat up and climbed into the chair I wondered what was bubbling forth from such a deep dark place that I wasn't conscious enough to recognize the cries as my own. I'd been in enough Jungian analysis to know this was a big one....

From the moment of that dream, I felt different. I had entered another space and realized time unfolded differently in this new place I inhabited. North was no longer North and South was no longer South. Feeling a little disoriented and lost, I was getting ready to journey in a mysterious land.

After dreaming for ten years about traveling to Turkey, I had always hoped my experiences would be memorable. My dream on the ferry announced some greater mystery that was waiting to be revealed. The voice that I cried out with for mother came from a deep place. I was pretty certain that it wasn't my mom back in Kansas I was yelling for with such intensity. Even at this early moment in the journey I knew it was the Great Mother I needed: the one who holds the whole world in her pelvic floor. What I didn't know was why I was calling for her.