Remembering Giraffe

A couple months ago I had an intensely emotional dream that later resonated with waking reality in an interesting way. I am in the home I lived in as a teenager, which was a magical Spanish style house built in the 1920’s that I visit frequently in my dreams. In the dream, Joe Sommerness is standing in the middle of the sunroom. Joe was a friend in high school who also struggled with addiction, but who lost his battle, committing suicide in college by gruesomely shooting his heart out with a shotgun. His shocking death was a turning point in my recovery and is at the heart of the novel I've been trying to write for the last 16 years GUT: Nuts and Bolts. He is surrounded in the dream by bloody rotting pieces of what I slowly realize is a dismembered giraffe. I am filled with rage and I yell at him "What are you doing leaving this rotting mess in here? All the bacteria is going to infect everyone else!" it ends with me howling a final ultimate threat, "I'm going to call your mom!" I realized when I woke up that that sunroom was where my family surrounded my ghastly drug addled self and did the heartfelt intervention that led to me going to treatment. I was really surprised by the Giraffe as this was a totally new addition to my shamanic dream animal pantheon. So a couple of weeks later, when a friend Duncan was presenting a video at the local Institute of Noetic Sciences meeting on Marshall Rosenberg’s non-violent communication and the e-mail talked about “Giraffe language” I knew I had to follow that long necked synchronicity. In the video he presented, Marshall had a hilarious way of explaining his radical approach to defanging our language. He used jackal and a giraffe handpuppets to comedically illustrate the difference between the violent divisive language of the mind and the healing unifying language of the heart. I discovered that this language of the heart is called Giraffe language because the Giraffe has the largest heart of all of the land mammals. And then to top it off, at one point in the conversation I looked behind me and was surprised to see a little stuffed Giraffe that some child had left perched in the window sill of the Friend’s meeting house. I got the crawling feeling that I was being stalked by Giraffe! So at the end of the discussion when Duncan invited us all to a Giraffe gathering the following weekend at a place nearby called Bumpity Road I was there. It was a wonderful group of big hearted seekers stretching way up high to get that yummy hard to reach green. While communing in the sun filled meeting room with that circle of green and growing people, I felt parts of my heart that had become infected lately with the bacteria of resentment and judgment towards the addicts that I work with fill with antiseptic compassion. In the radiant glow of the springtime sunshine, in the loving company of the Bumpity family, I remembered Giraffe.