Dog as God and Psychopomp in Dream Archaeology

 

A small example from my journals of one mode of dream archaeology: following clues from a dream to an ancient culture and turning up evidence or documentation for something that was previously unknown or  incompletely known. It may also be an example of dream precognition:  

May 8, 2022

Dream  

Power of the Dog in Dream Archaeology 

I'm excited by essays and materials I find in what at first seems to be a big white-bound bound volume. They include maps and charts and line drawings on an archaeology theme: The Dog. I reflect on related sources I have available to go further on this theme in my own research and writing, including Barry Lopez's fine work Of Wolves and Men.

Later I am out in the woods with a man who lives close to wolves. He leads the way off the main path to the right. He says the wolves are out, moving clockwise. It seems to be his plan to meet them face to face. I notice he hasn't brought his rifle. I'm willing to trust that he knows what he's doing and that if we meet the wolves face to face it will be a sociable encounter.

 

Where Dog=God and Psychopomp

After recording my, I opened my email and found my daily pdf from an academic website, a paper on canine burials at Saqqara during the Graeco-Roman period.. [*] It describes the mass burial and mummification of dogs in ancient Egypt, 1,350 at this site alone, tens of thousands at Abydos.

The authors suggest that the primary reason for canine burial here was to provide an organic embodiment of Anubis in his role as psychopomp, guiding souls between this world and the afterlife. The dog buried beside or near humans becomes "an amuletic animal mummy... considered to be either an adequate replacement for, or a valuable complement to the Anubis amulet to ensure the continuing and unbroken assistance of Anubis for the deceased."

The article contains maps and charts and line drawings including one of a 2nd century funerary stele from Terenouthis (Kom Abu Bellou), where the deceased is seen in the company of a dog and a falcon, aspects of Anubis and Horus.

So my dream of the archaeology of the dog seems to be a minor example of precognition or clairvoyance. The incoming email enabled me to fulfill part of my dream research assignment right away. I would probably not have made time to read that scholarly article without the dream; I had a few other reading assignments. 

It is interesting to reflect on where the wolves are circling. Their presence off-stage in that part of my the dream leads me to reflect on the evolution of the human-canine connection, In the Egyptian context, it may be relevant that Anubis and his two jackal-headed brothers, Wepwawet and Duamutef, are especially associated with wild canids. 

In one of my big dreams of Egypt twenty years earlier, my two beloved black dogs (both deceased) came out of a hollow tree, dripping with what looked like amniotic fluid and might have been resin or honey. They guided me through the pylon gate of an Egyptian temple that was both ancient and newly constructed. A beautiful cupbearer gave me wine infused with blue lotus. In an inner chamber I received profound revelations about soul and self that are indelible. Recalling my guides, the two black dogs, I think of how in some funerary stelae from Egypt, like one in the picture above, twin canids share the role of psychopomp. 

[*] Mary Hartley, Alanah Buck, Susanne Binder, "Canine Interments in the Teti Cemetery North at Saqqara during the Graeco-Roman period" in Miroslav Bárta, Filip Coppens and Jaromír Krejãí (eds) Abusir and Saqqara in the year 2010/1 (Prague: Czech Institute of Egyptology, Charles University, 2011) 17-29.

Photo: Funerary stela of Kopres. Roman Period, late 2nd century from Terenouthis. University of Michigan Excavations, 1935

 

 

 

Dreaming with the Animal Powers

 

When shamans go dreaming, characteristically they operate under the protection and guidance of animal guardians. Forging a close relationship with one or more "power animals" is central to developing the arts of shamanic dream travel and tracking. It is invaluable in maintaining healthy boundaries and defending psychic space. A conscious connection with the animal guardians shows us how to follow the natural paths of our energy. A strong working connection with the animal powers brings the ability to shapeshift the energy body and project energy forms that can operate at a distance from the physical body. 

Our ancestors believed that we are born with a connection with a particular totem animal; this was the raison d'être of the clan system. Some Australian Aborigines believe, up to the present day, that when a human is born, its "bush soul" is born in the form of an animal or bird. We may feel that we have a lifelong connection with a certain animal or bird. Others may observe this in our body type, our life styles, our modes of responding to challenges. 

But in the course of a lifetime, we may develop many animal connections. Some of these may stem from our relations with the animals who share our homes and habitats, from the family pets to wild animals encountered in nature and in our travels. Animals we have met in the physical world may reappear in our dreams, as allies and helpers. 

Here are two personal examples, one involving a dog who had shared our home, the other a bird who had shared our habitat: After a black dog I had loved was killed on the road, he appeared again and again as a family protector. His presence, for a time, was all but physical. Driving the Jeep he had loved to ride in, a family member saw him in the rearview mirror and told him firmly to "Sit down!" The dog had died, but he was still very much around, watching over the family he had loved fiercely. After a time, I performed a ceremony to release his spirit. 

After this, he appeared in a different way. A larger intelligence began to work through his form, and I found a black dog - who sometimes walked upright and even drove an automobile - appearing as a guide and bodyguard in my dreams and journeys. He showed me passages into the afterlife. He played guide and escort for me on a powerful and challenging journey that finally resolved a past-life issue that had shadowed my current life in many ways. I believe that, in the year after his death, I was dealing with the individual spirit of the dog I had loved. I feel that in later years, the form of my beloved dog has fused with a larger transpersonal source of guidance, linked to the precinct of Anubis, the "Opener of the Ways". 

On the same land where I lived with my black dog, I had a series of physical encounters with a red-tailed hawk who spoke to me in a language I felt I could understand - if I only spoke hawk. In a spontaneous vision one night, when I was drifting between waking and sleep, the hawk lent me her wings, and I found myself drawn to a cabin in the woods, north of Lake Champlain, where I had the first of a series of life-changing visits with an ancient Iroquois "woman of power." I have written about this at length in my book Dreamways of the Iroquois. The hawk has appeared again and again over the years, to offer confirmation or warning in its flight patterns over the roads of everyday life, and to lend me her wings in dreams and visions.

Animal dreams may be the doorway to developing strong working relations with the animal guardians. These dreams may hold up a mirror to our health or habits. They may show us how we need to feed and attend to our bodies. They may reveal a potential we have not yet developed. They may tell a story about our lives or relationships like one of Aesop's fables. They may be the place of encounter between our dream self and a spiritual ally or guardian. 

Our true spiritual teachers come looking for us in our dreams, and often they come in unexpected forms. The cat in your dreams may be the kitty you remember from childhood, or an aspect of your self that needs to be pampered or walk by night or play hunter, or a guide that has assumed a familiar face.

Recently my beloved calico cat, who died several years ago, has taken to visiting me, typically appearing in the drifty state between sleep and awake. She is both herself and a greater being I think of as the Calico Tiger. I am sure she is more than a part of me, and more than the lovely friend who liked to lie on the arm  of my reading chair. In her latest visitation, she brought a whole army of felines with her, large and small - maybe every cat who has shared my life in all the worlds. Some have been worshipped as deities; the others may think that they should be.

Illustration: "Calico Call" by Robert Moss

Dream Archaeology: Power of the Dog and Third Eye Wine

Two small examples of one mode of dream archaeology: following clues from a dream to an ancient culture and turning up evidence or documentation for something that was previously unknown or  incompletely known. First, an incident from this morning that may also be an example of dream precognition: 

May 8, 2022

Dream and Follow-Up

Power of the Dog in Dream Archaeology

I'm excited by essays and materials I find in what at first seems to be a big white-bound bound volume. They include maps and charts and line drawings on an archaeology theme: The Dog. I reflect on related sources I have available to go further on this theme in my own research and writing, including Barry Lopez's fine work "Of Wolves and Men".

Later I am out in the woods with a man who knows them well. He leads the way off the main path to the right. He says the wolves are out, moving clockwise. It seems to be his plan to meet them face to face. I notice he hasn't brought his rifle. I'm willing to trust that he knows what he's doing and that if we meet the wolves face to face it will be a sociable encounter.

WHERE DOG=GOD AND SOUL GUIDE

After recording these and several other scenes, I opened my email and found my daily pdf from an academic website, a paper on canine burials at Saqqara during the Graeco-Roman period by a team from Macquarie University in a collection published by the Czech Institute of Egyptology. [*] It describes the mass burial and mummification of dogs in ancient Egypt, 1,350 at this site alone, tens of thousands at Abydos.

The authors suggest that the primary reason for canine burial here was to provide an organic embodiment of Anubis in his role as psychopomp, guiding souls between this world and the afterlife. The dog buried beside or near humans becomes "an amuletic animal mummy... considered to be either an adequate replacement for, or a valuable complement to the Anubis amulet to ensure the continuing and unbroken assistance of Anubis for the deceased."

The article contains maps and charts and line drawings including the one shown here, of a 2nd century funerary stele from Terenouthis (Kom Abu Bellou), where the deceased is seen in the company of a dog and a falcon, aspects of Anubis and Horus.

So my dream of the archaeology of the dog seems to be a minor example of precognition or clairvoyance. The incoming email enabled me to fulfill part of my dream research assignment right away. I would probably not have made time to read that scholarly article without the dream; I have just a few other reading assignments. We'll see where the wolves are circling later on.

Here is a raw journal report from twenty years ago:

May 15, 2002

Dream

Egypt-Rome: Third Eye Wine

I am with a group traveling through ancient sites. We explore an Egyptian temple. Our female guide hurries the group past a chamber that intrigues me; it contains lovely blue-glazed pottery and a beautiful statue of a winged ba-soul. I tell the group, “This room is a chapel of the Ba.” The guide receives this with respect and acknowledgment. She tells us we will come out into one of the most beautiful vistas on earth.
    I expect to come out onto the Giza plateau. Instead, the scene above ground looks a lot like the Vatican City, outside St Peter’s. I swivel my head to the left, to look back at the huge temple we have just left. In the crowded street, there is some confusion as drivers and other tour guides push their vehicles through the throng. 
    I leave the group to stroll among vendors’ stalls and coffee shops. Three men in the market invite me to join them in a glass of wine. They may be Egyptian. They teach me to say “chess” in their language.
    I enter a dream within the dream. I learn that Egypt’s initiates used a “third eye wine” called Sem or Sekhem-Re. The wine was infused with blue water lilies. This helped to open the strong eye of vision, and to keep it open. 
    I am now able to look through an esoteric text titled “Initiates’ Vocabulary”. It explains key terms for soulcraft in ancient Egypt. There are terms here that are so far unknown to modern scholars.
    There is an obelisk in one of the scenes, perhaps in Rome.

Once again, dreams set us research assignments. Excited by the dream, I searched online and hit the books and discovered that in ancient Egypt, Sekhem-Ra was the name of a fine vintage wine. It took me many years until, researching a new course involving dreaming in ancient Egypt, I came upon reports from field archaeologists that confirmed what I learned in my dream, adding fascinating details of how the Egyptians classified wines and dedicated them to the fortunate dead - and may have infused some wines with blue water lilies.  The stele of Ipuy, a craftsman of Deir el-Medina near Luxor describes how he meets Hathor in a dream. This is apparently the first time a non-royal in ancient Egypt left a record of a dream encounter with a deity. The stele includes the picture of a wine jar capped by blue water lilies and a bunch of lettuce.

On the Egypt-Rome theme: I continue to research the fascinating syncretism between Egyptian and Graeco-Roman religion and practice, from the cult of Isis as described by Apuleius to the creation of hybrid deities like Serapis and Hermanubis. 

[*] Mary Hartley, Alanah Buck, Susanne Binder, "Canine Interments in the Teti Cemetery North at Saqqara during the Graeco-Roman period" in Miroslav Bárta, Filip Coppens and Jaromír Krejãí (eds) Abusir and Saqqara in the year 2010/1 (Prague: Czech Institute of Egyptology, Charles University, 2011) 17-29.

Dreaming with the animal powers

When shamans go dreaming, characteristically they operate under the protection and guidance of animal guardians. Forging a close relationship with one or more "power animals" is central to developing the arts of shamanic dream travel and tracking. It is invaluable in maintaining healthy boundaries and defending psychic space. A conscious connection with the animal guardians shows us how to follow the natural paths of our energy. A strong working connection with the animal powers brings the ability to shapeshift the energy body and project energy forms that can operate at a distance from the physical body. 

Our ancestors believed that we are born with a connection with a particular totem animal; this was the raison d'être of the clan system. Some Australian Aborigines believe, up to the present day, that when a human is born, its "bush soul" is born in the form of an animal or bird. We may feel that we have a lifelong connection with a certain animal or bird. Others may observe this in our body type, our life styles, our modes of responding to challenges. 

But in the course of a lifetime, we may develop many animal connections. Some of these may stem from our relations with the animals who share our homes and habitats, from the family pets to wild animals encountered in nature and in our travels. Animals we have met in the physical world may reappear in our dreams, as allies and helpers. 

Here are two personal examples, one involving a dog who had shared our home, the other a bird who had shared our habitat: After a black dog I had loved was killed on the road, he appeared again and again as a family protector. His presence, for a time, was all but physical. Driving the Jeep he had loved to ride in, a family member saw him in the rearview mirror and told him firmly to "Sit down!" The dog had died, but he was still very much around, watching over the family he had loved fiercely. After a time, I performed a ceremony to release his spirit. 

After this, he appeared in a different way. A larger intelligence began to work through his form, and I found a black dog - who sometimes walked upright and even drove an automobile - appearing as a guide and bodyguard in my dreams and journeys. He showed me passages into the afterlife. He played guide and escort for me on a powerful and challenging journey that finally resolved a past-life issue that had shadowed my current life in many ways. I believe that, in the year after his death, I was dealing with the individual spirit of the dog I had loved. I feel that in later years, the form of my beloved dog has fused with a larger transpersonal source of guidance, linked to the precinct of Anubis, the "Opener of the Ways". 

On the same land where I lived with my black dog, I had a series of physical encounters with a red-tailed hawk who spoke to me in a language I felt I could understand - if I only spoke hawk. In a spontaneous vision one night, when I was drifting between waking and sleep, the hawk lent me her wings, and I found myself drawn to a cabin in the woods, north of Lake Champlain, where I had the first of a series of life-changing visits with an ancient Iroquois "woman of power." I have written about this at length in my book Dreamways of the Iroquois. The hawk has appeared again and again over the years, to offer confirmation or warning in its flight patterns over the roads of everyday life, and to lend me her wings in dreams and visions.

Animal dreams may be the doorway to developing strong working relations with the animal guardians. These dreams may hold up a mirror to our health or habits. They may show us how we need to feed and attend to our bodies. They may reveal a potential we have not yet developed. They may tell a story about our lives or relationships like one of Aesop's fables. They may be the place of encounter between our dream self and a spiritual ally or guardian. 

Our true spiritual teachers come looking for us in our dreams, and often they come in unexpected forms.The cat in your dreams may be the kitty you remember from childhood, or an aspect of your self that needs to be pampered or walk by night or play hunter, or a guide that has assumed a familiar face.

Drawing: "Calico Tiger" by Robert Moss.  As she approached death, I dreamed that my beloved elderly calico cat had a giant version of herself waiting to receive her on the Other Side. After she died, I saw them fuse and become one.

Psychorrhagy, or the Origin of Ghosts and Doppelgangers

I am walking near a neighborhood store. From a block away, I see a friend who works in the store walking a dog, a German shepherd. It would be more accurate to say that she is walking him; he is struggling to keep up as she pulls on the leash. I don’t call out because they are quite some distance away, and cars are moving between us on a busy street. But as I return home from my walk, I stop by the wine shop. My friend is behind the counter, and I notice he has changed his clothes.
    “Where’s your dog?” I ask him.
    “She’s at home. I never bring her into the store.”
    “She’s a German shepherd, right?”
    “Right.” He stares at me. “How did you know?”
    “I thought I saw the two of you outside just now.” I describe the scene – including the checked shirt and brown pants I saw the man in the street wearing, which my friend recognizes – and especially my vision of the dog pulling him as if she wanted to take him somewhere,
    My friend turns pale. “I know where that might be,” he allows.
    He tells me, haltingly, that the woman with whom he lived for many years recently took her own life. He has not seen her since they broke up, did not go to her funeral and has not – yet – visited her gravesite.
    I get the impression that such a visit is now very much on his agenda.
    I find it fascinating that my friend’s doppelganger appeared with the double of his dog, which seemed to be leading him on an important mission – perhaps into the realm of the dead. Cross-culturally, dogs play an important role as conductors of souls in mythology, folklore and shamanic practice: as fierce boundary guardians (like Virgil’s Cerberus), as hellhounds that seize the wicked (like the red-eyed hounds of Annwn, a Celtic underworld), but above all as psychopomps (like Anubis or the dogs of Nehallenia, a Celtic patron of Otherworld voyagers) who can safely escort travelers between realms.
    This incident is quite instructive about the origin and nature of ghosts – ghosts of both the living and the dead, subtle ghosts that are perceptible only to the inner senses and heavy ghosts that are audible and visible to the physical senses.
    In its heyday around 1900, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) took a keen interest in “phantasms of the living”, ghosts, and dreams of the dead, correctly fining common elements in these phenomena. One of the founders of the SPR, the great Victorian psychic researcher Frederic Myers, coined a word to describe the origin of the kind of doppelganger I saw on the street. He called an episode of this kind a psychorrhagy. The word literally means a bursting or breaking loose of the psyche, as a hemorrhage is a bursting of blood. In Myers’full definition, psychorrhagy is “a special idiosyncrasy which tends to make the phantasm of a person easily perceptible; the breaking loose of a psychical element, definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion of space.” [1] This might be caused by strong emotion, such as grief or fear.
    Myers was a classicist and a poet as well as a parapsychologist. He was relentless not only in his quest for evidence of psychic events – and especially of the soul’s survival of physical death – but in his efforts to provide an exact vocabulary to describe such events. Drawing on his command of Greek and Latin, he coined the now familiar term telepathy as well as many other terms that are still in use by researchers in these fields – supernormal and retrocognition among others. Some of Myers’ coinages have caught on; psychorrhagy has not. It is rather hard on the eye of the average nonclassicist reader, especially when couples with diathesis, a medical term used to define a constitutional tendency towards certain ailments or symptoms. Psychorrhagic diathesis, in Myers’ lexicon, is “a habit or capacity of detaching some psychical element, involuntarily and without purpose, in such a way as to produce a phantasm.” [2]
      Translation? Think of my sighting of the double and his dog in front of the wine shop. Some of the psychic energy of my friend seems to have “broken loose” and produced a double – dense enough to be mistaken for his physical self even under the midday sun. For a living person to go on missing so much dense etheric energy for any length of time would be likely to produce fatigue, debility, and illness – and later, possibly physical death. Hence the old popular belief that seeing someone’s fetch (an English and Irish term for this kind of doppelganger could portend death. The uncanny nature of the double is reflected in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting "How They Met Themselves" in which a couple in a dark wood are astounded to meet their second selves are react accordingly - the woman by fainting, the man by drawing his sword. [3]
     Ghosts, in our usual parlance, are already dead, in the sense that the physical bodies from which they were projected have died. But a ghost may have originated before the physical death of its unconscious maker, through the unwitting projection or psychorrhagy of dense energy.
      Ghost that remain stuck in one place for years after death are rarely very interesting. Either they have lost their minds or their awareness is smothered by a heavy energy sheath, like something wrapped in used chewing gum. Of ghosts in this sense, Andrew Lang observed correctly, “Since the days of ancient Egypt, ghosts have learned, and have forgotten, nothing”. [4]

References

      1.F.W.H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (London: Longmans, Green, 1903) vol.1, xx.

      2. ibid. 

      3. Rossetti was fascinated by the double, and painted and drew several versions of this picture. He drew the first version when he was 23 and called it his Bogie Drawing. He painted his first watercolor version during his honeymoon with his model,Elizabeth Siddal, who died two years later from a laudanum overdose. When I was nineteen, I played Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a repertory performance titled "An Evening with the Pre-Raphaelites".

      4.Andrew Lang, Dreams and Ghosts (Hollywood CA: Newcastle Publishing,1972) 13-15

Text adapted from The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.

Art: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "How They Met Themseves" (1864 watercolor version)

Anubis in the backyard

Thirty years ago, because of a white oak and a red-tailed hawk, I moved to a farm in upstate New York on the edge of traditional Mohawk country. I brought with me my two beloved black dogs, "Sag Harbor mutts" - part Labrador, part German shepherd, larger than either breed. When Kipling's ears stood up, I joked that he looked like Anubis.
     On the night before Halloween that year, he got out on the road and was killed by a passing car. Shaking with grief, I wrapped his huge body in an old blanket, got him in the back of the battered Jeep - where he loved to ride - and drove, with a spade and mattock, up to the top of the hill on the north side of the house. I had often come here with Kipling to watch the rising of the moon. Sobbing, I dug a grave for my boy dog just outside the bounds of the human burial ground where the headstones of the first white settlers leaned at crazy angles.
   I felt that something had been cut out of my heart.
   However, I soon noticed that though Kipling's body was in the ground, he was very much still with us. Driving in the Jeep he loved, I once looked in the rearview mirror and saw him standing up, eager to see where we were. "Sit down, Kipling," I growled, before I realized that, in physical terms, my dog could not be there.
    Others saw him too. His presence was so palpable that when my elderly mother-in-law moved to a downtown street-level apartment, I asked Kipling to watch over her for the first few days, until we were able to get her a watchdog of her own. Late the first night, she heard people she considered to be ne'er-do-wells on the sidewalk in front of her door. Then she heard a dog's deep-chested growl, rising to booming barks. Someone outside said, "Forget it, there's a dog." The curious thing, according to Mary, was that the barking seemed to come from inside her apartment.
    My black dog's energy was with me in other ways, too, long after his death. I finally realized I needed to tell him it was okay to move on. I did this with an impromptu ceremony, barbecuing a steak for him on the deck, near the old loganberry tree. When I spoke words of love and releasing, the wind turned as quick as a kid on Rollerblades, and it sent the smoke skirring straight up the hill to Kipling's burial place.
    Then my black dog started coming in my dreams. He appeared to me, running and hunting as he loved to do, on a mysterious island across a river, When I called to him, he turned but appeared not to be able to see me, as if he and his world were covered by some kind of shrink-wrap that was translucent only from my side.
    Things moved along. His role in my dreams became one of a guide and ally, showing me things I needed to see but might not have noticed without his keen senses. Sometime he came out of a hollow tree, slicked with something sticky, like honey or amniotic fluid or liquid amber. He escorted me on journeys across perilous country, sometimes into realms of the human dead.
   I began to understand why the Egyptians chose a black dog or jackal as a psychopomp, or guide of the soul on the roads between the worlds. Garbed in black, he moves easily through the dark places. His keen senses make him an excellent tracker and enable him to sniff out, and dispose of, dead meat and dead energy that the spirit is meant to leave behind. And of all animals the canids are those that are friendliest to humans.
    After Kipling's sister Brandy died peacefully several years later, I dreamed that they were reunited in their spirit bodies and became one. When a black dog appears in my dreams and shamanic journeys now, I always pay very close attention, because I know I am dealing with Anubis in the Backyard. In the ordinary world, the appearance of a friendly back dog, especially under unusual circumstances, is a very good omen for me, road-tested over decades.

Text adapted from Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books. 

Photo: with Kipling and his sister Brandy at the farm in 1986.

Anubis loses his right knee: A cautionary tale

I have a little plastic figure of Anubis I like to carry around with me. Anubis is the canine-headed god of ancient Egypt who is most closely associated with dreaming and travel between the worlds. He's the one you want with you, in friendly mode, at the gates of the world-behind-the-world. In early Egypt, children were given figures of Anubis as guardians of the night and as encouragement to dream strong.
    The fact that my favorite Anubis talisman is just a $5 toy from the children's section of a museum shop tickles me, and brings a warm fuzzy sense of connection with both my Boy Roberts and the big black dog I loved fiercely. When his ears pricked up, he was a dead ringer for Anubis in his full canine form. After he was killed on the road, he returned to me again and again as an impeccable guide, in dreams and visions.
   Yesterday, noticing that Anubis was not on my desk, I went looking for him, and found him in the cargo pocket of the shorts I was wearing on a hot day, leading an adventure in "Dreaming Like an Egyptian" at Mosswood Hollow. When I placed the little figure at my right hand, next to my computer keyboard, I noticed that he was missing part of his right leg. It had broken off just above the knee. I felt even more affection for the little figure, remembering a beloved childhood story of a one-legged toy soldier ("The Steadfast Tin Soldier"). I did not dwell for long on the symbolism of the damage to the right leg, around the knee.
    In the afternoon, I was lugging a heavy burden down the stairs in my home. Since I suffered a knee injury six years ago, I take stairs very carefully, usually holding on to the railing. But the awkward load I was carrying required both hands. At the top of the lower staircase, I had a sudden, vivid vision of myself falling down the stairs. I brushed this aside, not wanting to step into an anxiety projection.
    I made it most of the way down the stairs when I fell, landing heavily on elbows and knees. Blood gushed from my right arm, just below the elbow, but the worst damage was to my right knee. This was the knee that I injured six years ago, when I managed to sever one of the muscles in the quad that holds the kneecap in place. I managed to avoid surgery, but I have needed to be very careful on slopes and stairs, especially going down.
    My knee creaked and complained, and was soon swollen to twice its regular size. Several Aleve tablets and icepacks later, the swelling had subsided and I could get around, limping a bit. I reflected on the fact that I was wearing the same Orvis polo shirt I was wearing on the day, six years before, when I first injured my right knee.
    I went online in the evening and saw that a friend who has taken my dream teacher training fell down stairs - on her face - about the same time.
    I picked up my Anubis figurine and touched the stump of its right leg. There really are things that like to happen together, as the Chinese say.
    Limping around the lake in the park with my little dog this morning, I think about lessons to be drawn. My fall down the stairs was eminently avoidable. I paid the price for failing to pay close enough attention to the kind of coincidence the ancients might have seen as a message from the realm of the gods, and then for confusing presentiment (my vision of the fall) with projection.
    A jogger passes me on the path around the lake. On the back of her tee-shirt is a spiral that forms a question mark. Another wink from the universe.
   To walk the spiral path in life is to notice each time you come to a choice or a situation that resembles one you have encountered before, and then apply what you can learn from the past experience to avoid repeating mistakes. I have seen, again and again, that the secret logic of our lives is revealed through resemblances. Yet I failed to apply the resemblance between Anubis' injury and my already wounded knee. I have experienced presentiment on hundreds of specific occasions, and have learned that my body often reacts to events before the events take place. Yet I brushed aside my vision of the fall.
    In the school of life lessons are repeated until we graduate from each class.
    For now, the fall day is as crisp as a Mackintosh apple just plucked from the tree. The sun is warm on my face, the breeze is cool in my hair, and my busted knee is working well enough to get me round the lake, though much more slowly than the runner with the spiral question mark.
    I'll be on the look out for the next spiral question that is put to me in life class. And I'll keep Anubis, missing his knee and his foreleg, closer to me than ever, to remind me not to fail to apply the logic of resemblances.
   

In praise of black dogs

In Praise of Black Dogs

I am in favor of personal superstitions.

Not the kind Granma mumbles

Or the stuff of fright-night movies

But the ones that grow on you

When you notice which incidents in a day

Are shadows cast by something ahead

And get to know which clues from the world

Are reliable road signs.

I think a black dog, if friendly,

Is always a good omen

And could be a god traveling in disguise.

Some days you don’t have to figure this out.

At the door of possibility on San Francisco Bay

A black dog crossed my path.

His walker, a ruddy man in a red pixie hat,

Told me the dog’s name is Pollo,

Short for Apollo.

I have a black dog of my own.

His name is Nubie, short for Anubis.

He lives in my dreams

And takes on many bodies in the world.

- from my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories. Published by Excelsior/State University of New York Press

 Photo: with my beloved black dogs, at the farm, in 1986.