I learned the word “intercede” when I was young and in Catholic school, as the thing that saints and angels do with your prayers: when you pray to a saint, they take your prayer to Jesus, and Jesus answers it, hopefully. The blessed intercede for you and share your message, like holy vouchers.

To define it: to intercede is to intervene on behalf of another. 

From a secular perspective, we intercede for others who are suffering, whether with presence, nourishment, or some other aid. To intercede carries a quality of service outside of prescribed duty — you don’t have to intercede. Instead, you do it for some other reason or reasons. An essence of appeal or spark of connection impels you to help or advocate or give. 

You become a conductor of care with interventions that go beyond mere intervening and interruption. With intercessions, love – not the romantic kind, but rather the broader, unifying kind – flourishes because the gravity of the circumstance is understood, felt, believed, and ultimately shared.

I’ve been wondering lately about how memories and dreams intercede between our unconscious and conscious mind. With their every appearance, memories and dreams bring imagery and sensation to the bridge of our awareness, ushering the past across and into the present. 

Sometimes these intercessions feel as though they’re riding on the backs of demons rather than angels or saints. Painful memories, terrifying dreams, and dark thoughts take up indefinite residency in the mind. 

It’s easier to ignore them, until it’s not. It’s easier then to let them consume you, until you estrange yourself completely from gratitude and joy. And I don’t mean joy in the bubbly, surface-smile kind – I mean joy in the subtle sense, the joy that lights your skin from within.

We can detect patterns and symbols in the images and sensations of our memories and dreams when we give attention to them. The patterns help us to understand what to focus on, what something could mean, and how we might live this life (differently) in a way that better suits our nature.

Witnessing the flow of the pattern as something separate from the witness is fundamental to Buddhism, Stoicism, and Jungian psychology, to name only a few of the many philosophies focused on focusing within in order to live wholly and without. Which is just to say that these are not new thoughts, far from novel, much closer to universal when you practice embracing a steady and agile perspective of your own inner landscape.