Where My Dreamtime Touches the Water

More about Where My Dreamtime Touches the Water

When I stand before Siwash Rock at dusk, something in me opens.

I want to be careful with words. “Dreamtime” belongs to cultures with lineages and responsibilities that are not mine. I don’t borrow that. What I mean is my own inner cosmology — the private architecture of dreams, memory, and symbol that has been building in me for decades. The place where alchemy, stone, tide, and story braid together.

This rock enters that interior map.

It rises out of the water like a vertical axis — above and below, sky and salt, light and depth. The face I see in it may be erosion, shadow, projection. But projection is not theft; it is confession. It tells me what I carry.

My life has always felt like layers of material: slag and ore, compost and gold, surface and pressure. The rock feels like a cooled eruption — something once molten, now firm. A reminder that intensity can harden into form. That what survives does not always shout.

I do not claim the origin story of this place. I do not speak for the Coast Salish teachings rooted here. I stand as a listener.

But I also allow the place to enter my own symbolic language.

In my dreams, everything connects — fourteen steps, emerald tables, birds rising from ash, tide lines reflecting a burning sun. The rock becomes one more node in that network. Not as possession, but as resonance.

The tide keeps moving around it. The city keeps rising behind it. My own story keeps unfolding inside it.

When I say everything connects, I mean this: the stone does not belong to my mythology — but my mythology can kneel before the stone. I can let it anchor a point in my internal compass without pretending it was placed there for me.

It is possible to feel connected without claiming ownership.
It is possible to feel meaning without rewriting history.
It is possible to let a place shape you without taking it.

As the sun drops and the face becomes silhouette, I feel that quiet convergence — my inner map touching the outer world.

Not to replace it.
Not to define it.
But to stand in relation.

And in that relation, something in me settles.