The Ancient War on the Human Body

Dear Community,

I woke from a nightmare with the words “Weeping Woman” in my mind. Strangely, in the dream, “Weeping Woman” was the name of a compensation package(!).

I searched for it after waking. No such compensation package exists. But The Weeping Woman is the title of a famous 1937 painting by Pablo Picasso. And La Llorona—“The Weeping Woman”—is also the title of one of my favorite songs. I am listening to it on repeat as I write this, and I invite you to listen with me (https://youtu.be/Pz1w-HNglAU?si=45d7SadEZi51P_FC)

“La Llorona” is one of Mexico’s best-known traditional folk songs, rooted in the legend of a grieving woman condemned to wander in search of her lost children. It is a song of love, unbearable loss, and grief. You can read more about the legend here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Llorona.

There were other details in the dream. The name Rafael Moreno appeared, although I don’t know anyone by that name. When I searched for him, I discovered that Rafael Moreno was a Colombian journalist (https://forbiddenstories.org/about-rafael-project/) who investigated corruption, organized crime, and illegal resource extraction in his home region of Córdoba. He was murdered in 2022 because of his work.

A weeping woman. A murdered truth-teller. A song of grief returning to me after more than a year.

I find it fascinating that my dreams seem to be drawing from Latin American history and culture, bringing forward people and stories I knew nothing about alongside things I once loved but had not consciously remembered in a long time. I have my own private intuitions about why Latin America may be entering my dreams now (hello, Brujo!).

Carl Jung believed that the symbols appearing in our dreams are not arbitrary. They carry meaning—but how do we discover what that meaning is?

One of my dream teachers, whose work is rooted in Jungian thought, believes that dreams connect us to an ancient intelligence: the accumulated wisdom of the human unconscious, speaking through symbols. These symbols do not necessarily have fixed, universal definitions. Each acquires meaning within the particular life of the dreamer. By noticing recurring images—and the feelings, memories, and associations they awaken—we can gradually create a personal dream dictionary. As we become more fluent in this symbolic language, our dreams may become easier to understand.

Some symbols have appeared in my dreams so consistently that I no longer doubt what they mean to me. When my daughter Sophia appears, for example, it usually signals that my own inner child needs attention—that I have not made enough room for rest and play.

But the weeping woman and Rafael Moreno are new symbols. They do not yet have entries in my personal dream dictionary.

Through an online artists’ group, I met someone who has created an elaborate, color-coded dream dictionary in Notion—not only for individual symbols, but also for combinations of symbols.

What a dream. Pun fully intended.

It is no accident that I encountered this practice through a community of artists. Dreams and art speak related languages. Both communicate through image, sensation, emotion, association, and metaphor. Both allow truths to emerge before the rational mind has organized them into an argument. Both ask us to become receptive to what we do not yet understand.

Last week, I spent time with a friend whom I consider kind, caring, honest, and firmly grounded in reality. During our conversation, however, I caught a flash of contempt in the way he spoke about artistic sensibility.

He told me about a man he knew who, at around  age 55, finally acknowledged his sexual orientation and began living openly as gay. This man now lives happily in Spain with his new partner. I asked whether there had been any indication, before he came out, that he might be gay. With an unmistakable sneer, my friend replied that the man had always been “artistic.”

To me, this was not merely a comment about the man’s interests. “Artistic” was being used as code: sensitive, feminine, possibly sexually ambiguous, perhaps not properly masculine or fully respectable. Contained in that one word was an entire hierarchy of human qualities: reason above feeling, practicality above beauty, restraint above expression, and the controlled mind above the living, feeling, expressive body.

It made me wonder whether disrespect for art is often connected to contempt for the body and the emotional life of the body.

Art emerges from our capacity to feel—from allowing ourselves to be moved by beauty, grief, desire, pleasure, mystery, and contradiction. It gives form to experiences the rational mind cannot fully organize and to truths that are not to be spoken about in polite society. 

Artistic sensibility requires receptivity: a willingness to let the world enter us, affect us, and perhaps even change us.

For someone who has survived by controlling the body, suppressing emotion, and remaining firmly “rooted in reality,” such receptivity may appear unserious, self-indulgent, feminine, or even dangerous.

The artist permits expression where the defended person has learned restraint. The artist treats feeling as a source of knowledge where the defended person may experience feeling as a threat to order.

Contempt conceals possibly something more vulnerable: fear of being affected, fear of losing control, or even envy of those who have retained access to parts of themselves that others were taught to amputate.

I cannot know whether any of this was true for my friend. A single sneer is not enough to explain another person’s inner world. But I recognized a larger cultural logic inside it. The word “artistic” had become a small container for a much broader contempt—for sensitivity, embodiment, queerness, and any way of being that refuses to place rational control above the full range of human experience.

And now I find myself returning to the weeping woman from my dream.

Maybe she represents what happens when grief is denied ordinary language and must return as image, music, legend, or nightmare. Maybe art and dreams do not take us away from reality. Maybe they carry the parts of reality that our controlled, respectable consciousness refuses to hold.

These reflections may seem removed from the violence, disconnection, and instability of our present moment, but I believe they are intimately connected. If we follow today’s crises toward their deepest roots, we eventually encounter an ancient war against the human body—against its feelings, desires, instincts, needs, and unruly forms of knowing—and the persistent attempt to bring it under control.

This does not explain everything. But I believe it explains far more than we generally acknowledge.

As always, I would love to know what these thoughts awaken in you. If something in this letter moved, unsettled, or challenged you, give it a voice. Come be part of the conversation.

With love, (a tiny sprinkle of) rage, and reverence,Your disorganized, recovering people-pleaser, community-dreamer, hope-filled activist in the making, deep-sleeper, clean compliment giver and receiver, not-a-true-exhibitionist, 21-day resetter, recovering prostitute, courageous by practice, trusting by skill, always with my head in the clouds, but loving my feet on the ground, soul worker (!), inner voice listener, pleasure list maker, Aquarium sleepover organizer, beginner-level meditator, wabi-sabi contemplator, self-fascinated observer, giving-up-machismo supporter, hot soup-slurper, enthusiastic and tired traveler, death by Yellowjackets antidote and higher consciousness dreamer, aspiring human rights warrior, 

Corina