Because I am walking, this morning, in a home away from home landscape, I am thinking about consciousness – what is vivid and clear, what is veiled and obscured. About how both the vivid and the veiled collaborate for psychic development.

My Florida years were happy and haunted. Dreams figured powerfully in my years of sleeping and waking on the Gulf Coast. Partly, because I was a psychotherapist and attuned to client's dreams. Partly because I was living in a landscape so alien to my childhood in New England. Establishing a home and family in a southern, tropical climate offered me vast psychic distance and contrast.

Within the first weeks of my newly married Florida life, pregnant with my son, I had my first of many anxiety dreams while dozing off to sleep, curled safe and satisfied beside my sleeping husband: the felt presence of an unseen and unwelcome intruder approaching my bed.

The vivid: my body, sweating, hyper-alert, short of breath, a palpable presence of threat 

The veiled: who and what is the threat, and why?

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, poet, psychoanalyst, storyteller, offers illuminating analysis and clues to a woman's psychic journey throughout her lifetime.

It would be a couple of years before I would discover her work through Women Who Run With the Wolves. When I did, her cues to a woman's psychic journey nurtured mine with her vital and dynamic respect for the vivid and veiled in female imagination.

All photos and text copyright Kelly DuMar unless otherwise attributed.