In this blog I am describing a new way of relating to dreams and imagination to help us creatively deepen and expand a new story of the people and the Earth.

A few nights ago I had a dream with the following scene: I am part of a small group of people about to be shown around a large older warehouse. The outer sides of the space are divided into open cubicles. I am being shown around by an older man who is my mentor. He has us walk over to the first cubicle on the left. I see a younger man with dark hair sitting on a chair. He puts on a set of black headphones and then picks up an object in his right hand. I see that it is oblong, about a foot long and half as wide. There is a whitish dome over the top two thirds and at the open end the bottom is dug out in to a bowl. I see a hummingbird come out from under the dome and sit in the bowl. My mentor says the young man is learning to connect deeply with nature through the headphones. Then the young man takes off the headphones and holds out his left hand. The hummingbird flies out of the bowl and lands on the young man’s open palm. I feel a sense of grace blossom in myself as I watch the hummingbird land. My mentor says that they are one, in relationship out of their own choosing. I feel my heart resonate openly with all I am experiencing.

As soon as I woke up I remembered the dream going over it a few times in my mind. I attempted to notice where a scene would catch my attention and strike a chord in me. Later on in the day as I was doing other things the scene described above came to me unbidden. I feel the scene chose itself with me in relationship with it (like the young man with the hummingbird in his hand). In other words we chose each other. This scene spoke to my heart in a way that I didn’t experience in the rest of the dream. I experienced something new in what arose and in my dream ego’s response to it. There were old familiar patterns in the dream and in some of my reactions to them. Instead of interpreting what this fragment or the whole dream meant I looked for the feeling of an opening resonance in my heart. In another dream what catches my attention will be something else.

It was at this moment, when I and the part of the dream resonated with each other, that I let my imagination go to work. In the past I often sat waiting for something more to happen. Often nothing did. Nothing new moved or arose. Still it may for you.  I realized slowly that I needed to let these resonant parts rest in me like an embryo or and egg rather than focusing intently on having something happen with my mind.  With this approach a new image would arise later unexpectedly, usually when I was moving.

What came this time was the hummingbird flying away from the young man’s hand. Around the warehouse he went. I could hear the sound of him flying. He was humming. Yes a new song. I felt my spirits rise and move with him. There was a sense of freedom and intensity as I soared around. Then the hummingbird was back on his shell in the bowl. I could see his colours. He had light green iridescent breast feathers and a very soft yellow body with light grey sides. At first I felt a judgement in myself about his colouring. Kind of dull colouring a voice said in me. I let this voice fade away rather than engaging with it, or trying to figure out what part of me might be saying that, or what it meant. I take these parts and work with them at the end of the process. Otherwise I end up at a creative dead end conceptualizing and controlling the dream imagery with my ego.

Later that day I painted the hummingbird below.  He is beautiful to me even though the painting is not ‘technically’ very good, perhaps more in the realm of art brut. What stays with me is my being the hummingbird, experiencing his flight, his energy, and his freedom, being unfettered and connected to the air. A new song. I found the experience beautiful and I felt different in myself afterward.

 

 

 

 

The description of what I did in relationship to the dream scene above is not cast in stone thereby becoming dogma and technique. What I feel is most important here are all of the new and different experiences that I go through-noticing and relating to the nuances in the dream and then after I wake up. These experiences are new, gifts from our deeper selves and nature that begin to create new threads of seeing and relating to ourselves and other beings. We can also begin to experience new parts of ourselves through our imagination and creativity like in the painting above.

Does the hummingbird singing a new song trigger something in you? Maybe a poem?

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I have decided to change the direction of this web site because the story that I have been living has turned a page and a new chapter wants to begin. The last chapter involved my coming to a deeper understanding of how the threads of the old story of the people were woven in to my life, distorting my relationships with nature, myself and other people.

Individuals who write about the development of human consciousness suggest that from the very beginning of human life we have used story telling, myth making and symbol connection to explain why we are here on Earth, what our lives mean and where we are going in the future. These parts include our hearts, bodies, mind and what I call our deep psyche. The first three being more subjective in nature, the last, if one descends deep enough, may be objective. THE OTHER WHO WISHES TO SPEAK AND TO BE HEARD.

Earlier in my depth work most of my experiences involved unearthing the various unconscious or darkened corners of myself that I had disowned, neglected, rejected or feared, those joyful loving parts, the dark/’evil’ bits and so on. I experienced a lot of suffering and pain going through this descent. Eventually I worked through to a place where I could begin to experience and understand (not rationally, more poetically/artistically) that something within me desired to speak to and through me and something outside of myself in nature desired to speak to me as well. I found that they are the same voice. And so my heart and soul desired a deepening of their connection with the inner and outer OTHER.

From the voices in the darkness within ourselves and in nature, the lament of the dead so to speak, a new story of the people and the Earth can be created over time. It is clear to me the old story  needs to die, is dying. In the end this dying will likely destroy a large part of what we consider the heart, the life force, and beauty of the natural world. In the ashes of this destruction as we open our hearts to a new way of relating to ourselves and the Earth we will begin the healing of Gaia and all life that remains.

Human adaptability can sustain life where it might perish. The will and instinct to survive  can be destructive when we live unconsciously, out of a balance with nature. This adaptability may also allow us to survive long enough to create a new mythology of the people using our creative gift, imagination. Tempered with the memory of our past destructiveness an organic new story of life can be woven in to the world.

I believe that the world of nature and of the human psyche are part of the same thing-the Mystery of Life. Through experiences in nature and in my dreams over many years I have come to recognize that I have been missing Mystery’s attempts to communicate with me. Now I am opening more and more to this joyful and difficult communication.

My desire is that my web site becomes a place where individuals can see the evolution of my story. Not in a narcissistic way but to have a glimpse into the creative and imaginative process any individual can undertake for their own healing and that of the Earth.

 

 

 

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Recently I have been packing the saddle bags for my bike with food, art supplies and extra clothing, loading them on my bike and pedaling down into the river valley to a park. I find my usual spot under a communal covered picnic area like a car port and set up shop. In my last blog I attached a watercolour picture that I painted there from a dream that I had not too long ago. Following the theme of creating art from sparks of connection from dreams, I held last night’s dream within me and let it connect with my imagination. I avoided the urge to interpret the dream and found as I moved around in the morning a connection to the edge of things, the new life in the world as earth is exposed by massive natural events. My dream contained earthquakes and drought opening up and exposing new earth, releasing new life and colour from what was covered over and familiar. New life seems to be at the edge of what is familiar, at the edge of things. Growth can come from destruction, death.

I sat for a bit and then had an image of what I wanted to do come into my being. I painted away for a bit. The completed image is attached below.

Then I read some poems by Pattiann Rogers. I will quote a poem from her book “Firekeeper-Selected Poems” which seemed to connect with the edge of new life I painted and dreamt about.

 

The Rights of Passage

The inner cell of each frog egg laid today

In these still open waters is surrounded

By melanin pigment, by a jelly capsule

Acting as cushion to the falling of the surf,

As buffer to the loud crow-calling

Coming from the cleared forests to the north.

 

At 77 degrees the single cell cleaves in 90 minutes

Then cleaves again and in five hours forms the hollow

Ball of the blastula. In the dark, 18 hours later,

Even as a shuffle in the grass moves the shadows

On the shore and the stripes of the moon on the sand

Disappear and the sounds of the heron jerk

Across the lake, the growing blastula turns itself

Inside out unassisted and becomes a gut.

 

What is the source of the tension instigating next

The rudimentary tails and gills, the cobweb of veins?

What is the impetus slowly directing the hard-core

Current right up the scale to that one definite moment

When a fold of cells quivers suddenly for the first time

And someone says loudly “heart,” beating steadily,

Bearing now in the white water of the moon

The instantaneous distinction of being liable to death?

 

Above me, the full moon, round and floating deep

In its capsule of sky, never trembles.

In ten thousand years it will never involute

It’s white frozen blastula to form a gut,

Will never by a heart be called born.

 

Think of that part of me wishing tonight to remember

The split second edge before the beginning,

To remember by sudden white involution of sight,

By a vision of tension folding itself

Inside clear open waters, by imitating a manipulation

Of cells in a moment of distinction, wishing to remember

The entire language made during the crossing.

 

An astounding poem. Many of her poems have an erotic quality related to humanity and nature.

Afterward I picked up a book I was reading by Martin Shaw “A Branch from the Lightening Tree” which is about ecstatic myth and the grace in wildness as he puts it in the sub-title. I was reading a section about death. Here Martin Shaw writes about courting death rather than ignoring her as we do in our youth obsessed western culture. Courting death, is like ”a form of archaic gambling” he writes, “to construct strange little dances to honor her, never to ignore her.” Initiation through a connection with wilderness is a wave in her direction he writes, “it opens a dialog that should inform the rest of our lives, rather than meeting her all at once, rather abruptly, at the end.”

 

And then he speaks about Cesar Vallejo’s writing, where, “as humans we carry a slight suspicion that we may be immortal, and this makes us miserable.” Cesar Vallejo writes as follows: “”Ruben Dario has said that the grief of the gods is never to attain death. Regarding men, if they were, from the moment they are conscious, certain of attaining death, they would be joyous forever. Unfortunately, men are never certain of their death: they feel the dark anxiety and the yearning of dying, but always doubt their death. The grief of men, we can say, is never to be certain of death.””

 

As I read the quote from Cesar Vallejo a black fly landed on the page directly below the quote with its head pointing towards the quote. I became curious, was this something unusual, perhaps similar to my experience with the bees which I wrote about in my old blog? Then the fly took off and landed directly on the area of my third eye. It stayed there for a few seconds and then flew off. Inside myself I went wow this is something to mull over. Then just after I finished reading the quote I looked up to take in what was written and the fly was on a post 5 feet from me looking in my direction. Take from this what you might. I experience this as nature speaking.

Then I had lunch and rode home still mulling it over.

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