I knew there was a reason. That vague unsettling feeling that led me three months ago, the dissatisfaction, the burn of things not lining up, of too many things jostling for attention, coincidence upon haphazard colliding with force, simultaneity and synchronicity impacting, and the collisions were too forceful within my warring selves. I wrote apocali (?), not one, multiple apocalypses, saw the wrongness of that word, the lack of it, the very wrongness an unease I couldn't pinpoint. How could it not encompass the multiplicity of endings being drawn together? That noticing made me afraid. The bling-sightedness of all those prophets. Mass hysteria and conspiracy, all singular and selfish. And here, just on page 84, something I didn't know was true, yet, has just been confirmed by China Mieville. A bit dramatically, but all the same. The right chord is struck. The brush takes the next stroke. Is it any wonder then that I feel... vindicated? relieved? Someone else noticed and wrote to my fears. Made them sane. Made them fictive and poetic, spelled them out in myth. Which has its roots in the collective unconscious and without reason, beyond reason, draws us in from the night of logic. Here you're not alone, he whispers, here the world is raving mad. Some comfort.

"It's the ends of the world."
"End of the world?"
"Ends."--- Kraken, by China Mieville

Dreamstates: Vision and flight

This is another attempt at documenting my inner landscape. Let's hope it sticks this time. Each narrative is related in a larger whole through journeys into the dreamtime. My goal is to make the stories relatable and inspiring, and leave some personal details out of it. Dreamwork is pretty easy, all you have to do is close your eyes.
* * *
An inner voice impelled me to sit down, and then turn to face a closed door, and next to close my eyes. I found myself flying on the back of a peregrine falcon past a stream of colors. A great owl was ahead of us, and time stretched as the tiny falcon and I encircled his enormous shoulder to face him. The owl, not gently at all, said, “Wake up, the phone call is for you, stupid!” He then touched the tip of his wing feathers to the center of my forehead. Light began to beam from the touch and swirl all around us. Then the owl brushed me with his wings, as if removing dust from the space all around my body, clearing out my aura. I remember thinking how much I want an owl wing. As I am thinking about wings, he traces the place under my arms where my wing feathers will grow. He tells me that when I get back to the real world I will be able to fly. Then the owl pauses, examining my arms. It is as if something is missing from among my invisible-as-yet-ungrown feathers. “Where are your pinions?” he asks. With that question, I resurface.

I awoke to find the world windy in its grey cloud cover. What a day it will be today. I thought that it was my imagination. Those owls of the mind that never swooped except in self-recrimination, levelling loneliness into a silhouette with tufted ears, but maybe there WAS more, a creeping, inching enjoyment growing from a shadow to cover the moon, who had his intentions elsewhere. What does an intentional community really mean? The rustle of the open wind gave no answer. Instead, the whole sky was a shepherd, and gusted about sheep clouds, fat-bodied in their layer of the atmosphere. At night the stars went deep into the rich velvet of the sky. But no one stayed to watch them long. Everyone tried sleeping and found that they were waking to another time, the dreamtime. If there were any approximation of luck in the universe, the measure of its joy would be all in carelessness, care-free-ness. So we will see how soon I become someone warmer. I am not the most solar of creatures. Maybe I can be you though. Maybe the act of writing makes me large. If there was ever a way to go from here, I would be borne upon a paper flying carpet with a big pen in my hand. What do I want you to say, my friend? Words of praise, comfort, criticism? But you stay silent. You are wise. I don't want those things. You cannot address the question of what I want. You are not my god, my muse, the big thing that calls me in form the universe to do it honor. I am rolling with the air above, I am pictured in the halls of mountains. Their valleys pine for me, leave a negative space for me to fill, like the gently curving back of the lover, wishing to be held. I am coming home. I am coming home. I am coming home into myself.

The Money Tree

- a story I wrote when I was 11. The best story I've ever written, in my opinion.

Susan came running back to the house breathless. She gasped out "Tree!" and pointed toward the trails she had been on near their summer house. Mark asked if she could show him the way and Susan only nodded. She walked slowly up the trail and began to recover her breath. She told Mark that she had decided to explore the grounds around the summer house and had followed this trail for about a quarter of a mile, and then there was a little clearing, with a single little tree in the middle. It was a kind of tree the children had never seen before, and it had beautiful flowers on it. They were silvery with golden centers. They brought a bouquet home for their mother. They went there every day until summer was over and it was time to go to school. They went back to the tree for the last time and saw that the tree had seeded over and now had bright green pods. They opened some, and a silver dollar fell out of each pod. "Quick," Mark said, "gather lots of the pods and open them all! It might run out soon and we could be rich!" They did become rich and next summer they went back and got more money. They had enough to get both of them through college. They got an early retirement plan and lived in a mansion in the winter and they always went to the summer house in the summer.

The chariot

I see the charge of my task as a rocking horse on the tidal sands of a beach. This horse is stationary like the Chariot in the tarot deck, yet they both contain the meaning of direction. One foot in water, and one on land, the charioteer brings together opposites, light and dark, to guide them in the same direction, steering opposite forces to move in a productive direction. At the moment, I stand in an estuarine environment, a changing borderland where forces impact and diffuse, bleed one into the other. The question that the charioteer must answer: does this movement carry me closer to my goal? And then comes the knowledge that headlong pursuit may be ruinous. As the chariot draws up alongside its opponent it is victorious. The chariot says that victory is what happens after the battle, the governing of a new kingdom, and drawing from that polarity into a united directed purpose.

Tidbits from Earth Activist Training:

Weeds are the Earth's immunological response to an open wound.

Make running water walk and walking water stand still.

We can solve climate change by building carbon (read: organic matter) into our soils.

We are the rising sun
We are the change
We are the ones we have been waiting for
And we are dawning.