Pink silk road

Last night I dreamed I set up a director's chair for myself at the front of a huge gathering. Instead of canvas, the seat was pink shot silk. 


Waking, I remembered an encounter with a curious figure in a thriller of a dream I recorded in August 2006 - a huge bear-like man dressed in a pink frock coat with an amazing pink tie that grew to any length he imagined. 


Yes, I know Freud will be stirring now but I suspect there's much more going on, so I'll follow the pink silk road in my dreams and beyond.

Rose Gate among the stars

There’s a garden among the stars

where flowers are gates to other worlds.

I see a Lady stepping from a constellation of stars into a boat in the sky. I want to meet her. This will be a far journey, and I want the drum to give me fuel and to help me to return safely. My friend is a good drummer,and she is ready to provide what I need.
     When I get my body settled on the sofa in order to slip out of it, the Lady has vanished. I search for her in the field of stars. I see something like a pink rose, out there in the wild blue. Is this her sign?
     The rose calls me, unfurling its soft petals, revealing a portal. I slip into the heart of the rose. Now I am sliding down a chute that might be its stem. I make a soft landing in a gentle scene, a Victorian garden where a table is set for high tea. A handsome, very properly dressed Victorian lady is pouring.
      I roam the garden, wanting tounderstand why I was drawn here. Young children are playing here, including agirl on a swing. A pleasant clergyman in country tweeds is playing with them. I know at once that this is the Rev. Charles Dodgson, known to countless readersas “Lewis Carroll”.

    As I observe him among the children, I realize I am present at the inception of some of Lewis Carroll’s best ideas. He looks at a rabbit burrow and the roots of a tree with the eyes of one of the children. With this borrowed sight, he can picture Alice dropping down the rabbit-hole into another world. As a child smiles at ginger cat in the garden, he sees the smile on the face of the Cheshire Cat. As he contemplates the pretty young girl swinging high into the air, he gets the idea– not actually used in the Alice books, as far as I can recall – for another way of entering another dimension. The swing goes up above the bar…and you’re off into another world.

    I borrow from where his imagination will lead. I think about the “Drink Me” bottles Alice found, and decide to see what will happen now if I drink from the one that makes you very much smaller. 

    Quick as thought,I am shrinking so fast I don’t even have time to see how that blade of grass grew as big as a royal palm, or how that ant became a black six-legged elephant.
    Dropping between the smallest of particles, I enter a universe as big as the one I came from, a cosmos contained within a speck of a speck of a speck, something you couldn’t find even with an electron microscope. This revelation is as simple as cracking your head open. It’s about finding the infinite in a grain of sand, as the poet did. It’s about universe hopping, pearl by pearl, on the necklace of Indra.    

   I am eager to explore this fresh universe, full of promise. And to find the Lady.

      But something falls across my path. It moves jerkily, an armored, jointed, mechanical thing. Its shape reminds me a little of cardboard periscopes I played with as a boy –the kind with joints that enabled you to peek around a corner. But this metallic thing is taller than a skyscraper. At its end is a rectangular hollow or “mouth” that might be an immense suction cup.
     Guard yourself, says an inner voice I have learned to trust. With this, an impermeable, transparent shield goes up, and I know I am safe, and invisible to whatever intruded.

   Steer for the Light Ship.

   I see it again now, in the distance. It looks like a kind of space station. I understand that it is a place of transit and communication with higher intelligences as they move in and out of range of human thought bands.
   I will go there on another journey.
   For now, I am content to come back to the body on the couch, settle in, and stretch and wiggle around to make sure I did not leave too much of myself out there in the field of stars..

The fragrance of the pink rose is still with me. I sip a glass of wine and write with its beauty within and around me:

There’s a garden among the stars

where flowers are gates to other worlds.

Try the pink rosebud that opens shyly.

plunge through its smooth and fragrant folds

into the Victorian garden where tea is laid

and sweet girls play and show a blushing priest

a bunnyhole that leads to Wonderland

and a ginger cat issues opaque directions.

Take the dare of the “Drink Me” bottle

and you’ll become inconceivably small

even faster than Alice,so fast you won’t see

a grass blade rear into a royal palm

and ants turn into six-legged horses.

You’ll grow, by diminishing, into a world

vaster than the one you knew before,

you’ll swim among stars no telescope has seen,

you’ll find light-ships among the galaxies,

immensity held in the iota of a speck

that eludes the electron microscope

but not the home-drawn voyager.

As I enter another Northern winter, I am doing what I often do in this inward time: mining my old journals. I have previously published the Rose Gate poem, but not the narrative of the journey that inspired it. Yes: I have made (and guided) many other journeys to universes within the inconceivably small.

Homage to the Pink Rose. Photos by Kirsten Love Lauzon.

Where's the Hitch?

In his autobiography, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens declared, “I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.” It seems he fulfilled this wish, chronicling his struggle with esophageal cancer until he succumbed to pneumonia, a side-effect, yesterday, aged 62. I knew Christopher when we were both in our 20s. Though I often disagreed with his opinions - which veered from youthful Trotskyite verbal bomb-throwing to neocon advocacy of America's disastrous war in Iraq - I admired his blistering wit, his ferocious literacy, his wicked contrarian courage. He never met a tide he wasn’t willing to throw himself against, preferably with a bottle of Johnny Walker Black (his “breakfast of champions”) in hand.

Fare well, Christopher Hitchens. You denied God and gods, and spurned the heaven of religions as a "celestial North Korea". You are now entering a larger geography than you knew in the 60-some countries from which you reported. May your many gifts, and your delight in the dance and slash of words, serve you on the road of this immense journey. May you avoid leaving any part of you stuck in a bottle of Johnny Black. May you file fresh accounts from new territories, and find native guides who will help you to understand what you are experiencing. May your paths be open.

Robin Hood, Changing Woman & the Battle of Britain

I am walking with companions across hills and fields with a view to London and the English Channel. A war is being waged in the air. Though the main battles are far away, large pieces of debris – and small airplanes that look no bigger than crop dusters, some even smaller – come crashing down around us.

There is no sense of panic. The falling planes and pieces of metal seem to be coming down very slowly, slowly enough to dodge them even if they are coming straight at us. I do this several times. Their substance also seems softer than shrapnel or metal. I feel I could push them away with my hand as if they were merely cardboard or felt (and may do this too).

I lead my group down into London, to a square near the dockyards. No sign of modern traffic congestion. We gather a great group of people, mostly women, in the square. We sign and dance in a circle. Around us, at the cardinal directions, heraldic devices are set up on posts. We are singing and dancing to bring change.

I lead the group in singing an old song of Changing Woman

There is a woman who weaves the night sky
See how she spins, see her fingers fly
She is within us from beginning to end
Our Grandmother, sister and friend
She changes everything she touches
Everything she touches changes

The women, in particular, love this. We spin faster and faster, turning deosil (to the right). Then I pause the group, and step into the center of the great circle.

I notice with clarity, for the first time, the devices set up on the post that is now facing me; I think this is on the north side of the circle.

There are the words “ROBIN” and “AIR”, separate, and in capitals. There is a symbol that at first appears to be an anchor but I think is a bow and arrow. With a thrill of excitement I realize that these devices are related to Robin Hood and that the square was the scene of a drama from his life. With this recognition comes the sense that we are succeeding in calling up ancestral forces to help with the battle that has been raging in the skies and could soon reach the land.

Now I hear the great voice, loud and merry, of an Englishman who is coming to join us. I can now withdraw from leading the people and leave him to take charge.

Feelings: Excited, stirred.

First thoughts: I feel like I was a time traveler in the period of the Battle of Britain. Though I appeared substantial to those around me, I seemed impervious to things that would ordinarily wound or destroy a body – perhaps because I was moving in a subtle energy body, or had unusual powers, such as the ability to slow the experience of time (so the falling planes appeared to be coming down in slow motion) and to thin and loosen the molecular structure of objects.

Was I in my present body, or in the body of a contemporary person? Not sure.

It seems one of the key assignments of my dream self was to help call up ancestral forces, to awaken the sleeping powers of the land to support the living in a struggle for survival. An incident in the “psychic Battle of Britain”, perhaps…

Bear tracks to the cave of the vanishing god

My day began with my little dog pushing his bushy face against mine as I lay back on the pillow. I petted him and sang to him. Without considering the content, I found I was singing the Romanian version of a song to call the spirit Bear that is a favorite in my workshops.

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Romanian friends helped me make the translation when I taught in Bucharest a couple of years ago.

Nu plânge micutule

Nu plânge micutule

Ursul danseze pentru tine

Ursul danseze pentru tine

Don't cry little one
Don't cry little one
The Bear is coming to dance for you
The Bear is coming to dance for you

After walking the dogs, I went online and found a Romanian Facebook friend had just commented on the article I posted here about the Vapor Drinker I met while traveling to Santa Fe for the board meeting of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners last weekend

When I told him I am returning to Romania in October 2012, to lead an adventure in shamanic dreaming and dream archaeology in the Bucegi mountains, he replied:

Ursii te asteapta! "The bears are waiting for you."

I shared today's Bear story with the physician who is the current president of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners, who told me he loves bears after I led the group in singing the Bear song. He told me that his grandfather was Romanian.

Right after this, I received an email from my coordinator in Romania telling me that she is considering a workshop site called....The Cabin of the Bears.

Good stories can have many installments, or sequels. I suspect that this one is going to go far.

There is a tribe of gypsies in Romania called the Ursari, or Bear People. They go from village to village dancing with trained bears at fairs. -

The Bear may also be at the heart of the ancient mystery religion of the Dacians (in what is now Romania). Herodotus and other ancient Greek writers mention a mysterious god of the Getae named Zalmoxis. Most likely (the etymology is disputed) this name means "Bear Skin" or "He Who Wears the Bear Skin", deriving from the tradition that the infant Zalmoxis was wrapped in a bear hide (zalmon, in Getic).-

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On a deeper level, the Bear connection involves the Underworld journey. Zalmoxis is one of the god-men who dies and is reborn. He goes down into the Underworld as the bear goes down into its cave, to hibernate. Zalmoxis reappears after three years to impart the "knowledge of the skies" to humans. Central to his teachings was the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and the idea that we cannot heal the body without healing the soul. Mircea Eliade wrote a monograph about Zalmoxis subtitled "The Vanishing God".

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To know Zalmoxis, perhaps, we have to dream him. Romania seems ripe for fresh adventures in dream archaeology, in which we use the techniques of Active Dreaming to open direct channels to ancient knowledge, and then use the best of modern science and scholarship to confirm our leads. -