"Dear Dad, Today I am going to tell you...

...how I feel inside because mom never understands what I feel like deep down inside of my heart. I feel like I have so much madness and sadness boiling and festering inside of me that it is so bad. One time or maybe even a couple of times, I wished I was dead. There I said it.

I hope someday, my madness and sadness will turn into joy and happyness."

This letter was written by a twelve year old girl whose father committed suicide when she was eight years old. She has not been successful at connecting with her mother who is so consumed with her own problems that she cannot see beyond herself.

I have written about her before, this girl who dreams of becoming a flying dragon, or Pegasus the winged horse, or whose dream upon her thirteenth birthday is to become a shape-shifter. Her imagination sees beyond the world we apprehend with our concretized eyes and ears, and yet this wonderous love and reverence for imagination is perceived as mental illness and she is issued a diagnosis. She is prescribed medication that dulls her senses and subdues the images of her dreams and her imagination so that she does not create problems in school, or for her mother, who tires of her endless questions about the landscape she sees when she closes her eyes and the spirit of the wolf in her Cherokee ancestry.

Today she sobs uncontrollably in front of her mother and me when I read her letter out loud to her dead father. She is so hungry to connect with something that validates what her soul already knows. She lives in the realm where image and dream are reality and the world just gets in the way. Carl Jung would have taken her into his arms and wrapped her in love, assuring her that her intuition is indeed the authentic voice, a voice many of us ignore or silence because of its ill fit with constructed reality. He would have told her that she shares a special place among many poets, artists and dreamers who have been condemned as "insane," throughout the last three centuries.

She rocks herself back and forth as tears fall like a river. "Mom, you are not being the wolf spirit! Wolves are our feminine spirit animals and you are not being that to me!" she cries gazing up at the photo of the wolf on the wall.

I glance at her mother who for once is not yelling or criticizing. When she attempts to yell in defense, I hold my hand up in a gesture of silence, allowing her daughter to continue.

"I just need you to love me like my dad loved me mom! He was the best dad ever in the whole world....even the whole universe!"

Her mother defends, "You barely ever saw him! He was never here!"

My eyes fill and I try to hold her daughter's experience of her father while also containing her mother's perception of his absence.I explain that her daughter is cherishing a memory that offers a glimmer of the sweet love she craves. Whether her memory is factual is immaterial; it is the longing for love and connection that matters. It is simply expressed as the idealized love she experiences when she remembers her father.

Her mother escalates, raving about how her daughter steals food in the middle of the night, how she steals her jewelry to wear in front of the mirror just to see what it feels like.

My voice is almost a whisper. "She longs for you. Her stealing is symbolic of a hunger she is trying to feed. It is not for food or jewelry or money; it is simply this; She wants you to teach her about what you know very deep inside from long ago, about wolf spirits and dragons. She wants to feel a kindred with you, not with me or a case worker or social worker...just you."

I swallow hoping she will not turn away and tell me to leave her house immediately.

"You must teach her to love her imagination. You know perfectly well she is not insane or mentally ill. Our culture has segregated imagination and dream to fit a construct created by people who benefit by such things as diagnosing people with mental illness, namely the medical community."

She nods her head in affirmation. She recalls her own dreams and a dream journal she once kept, now tucked away on a shelf covered in dust. I notice that all her crystals and mandalas have been dusted since my last visit.

I let my breath out and her daughter looks into my eyes. I tell her, "You must be careful about whom you share these visions of yours. Not many will appreciate and understand what you know and see. You must learn to be the shape-shifter you wish to become on your thirteenth birthday, which means you must speak whichever language works in the reality you are in. Do you understand?"

She nods and says, "yes." her mother nods "yes."

She tells me about a recurring dream she has of a sea gull eating her older sister. The bird is red and blue, red symbolizing anger and evil, blue symbolizing calm and peace. She says the bird becomes more red with each recurrent dream and she is unable to speak or do anything to save her sister. She feels powerless against this force of evil and wonders if there is some power that she can access from her ancestry to save her sister.

She asks her mother if there is such a power in her ancestry. A power that she can access to reclaim peace and serenity. Her mother nods that indeed, such a power exists.

"When will I know it?" she asks her mother.

"You will know. It is not something that happens at a certain age; it happens when you are ready to know it," her mother says.

I sit in the room surrounded by dusty pictures of wolves, of grandmothers dressed in deerskin, and shelves of stones and symbols where meaning still lives among the symbols of American life.

I have only one or two hours per week and only so much energy in this tired body to give.

"Do you believe dreams come true if you imagine hard enough?" she asks me as I prepare to leave.

"Oh I absolutely believe that we have not even begun to know the power of our imaginations," I say and hug her goodbye.

If I did not believe in miracles, I do not think I would survive one more second in this work.

"Oh please, oh please," I pray as I get in my car to make the long drive home. "Let this mother and daughter find one another..and make it soon."