Airport Bardo: Earth Mother Trumps the Trickster

I arrive at my local airport and check in for my trip to Oakland and a weekend adventure in Dreaming with Jung that I will lead at a charming location in Berkeley. All is calm and easy at the Southwest deck, in a morning lull. I clear security, get strong black coffee, and pluck a book from my carry-on library to do morning bibliomancy. The book is an old favorite: The Language of the Birds, a collection of texts and poems involving shamanic traditions and interspecies communication edited by David N. Guss. It is full of pencil notes and post-it stickers from my previous readings.
    The book falls open at a photo I had failed to examine closely before. It shows a disturbing masked figure from a "winter dance" of the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest. From the caption I learn that the dancer in this outfit embodies a mythic figure called the Bringer of Confusions, who uses his wiles to ensure you get lost and can't get out of the deep woods.
    Not the best portent for the journey I am beginning. I tell myself that the image the book has given me relates to the chaos in the country and the Bringer of Confusions who is watching TV and swinging a golf club in Florida this weekend. However, as above, so below. It is soon clear that the Trickster is directly at play not only in the affairs of the collective, but in my personal situation today.
    We are lined up by the numbers to board the first Southwest flight to BWI when we are told to sit down while a possible mechanical issue is assessed. Mechanics are on their way. It may take five minutes or 30 for the problem to be fixed. Half an hour later, the mechanics have not arrived. We are told to stay in the departure area because the plane could be cleared for takeoff as soon as they come, and we'll be left behind if we are not in the boarding area.
    I hover near the Customer Service desk, ready to seek alternate flights if necessary to get to Oakland today. An odd-looking man walks past me carrying a heavy staff topped by a decorated skull, half the size of a human head. Hard for me to read this as a good sign.
    The mechanics arrive. We are told to wait where we are. An hour later we were told that the plane is definitively broken, has been pulled to pieces, and won't go anywhere today. They will provide a replacement plane but it won't take off until 6 1/2 hours after our scheduled departure.    It takes another half hour for  me to get to the head of the line at customer service to see whether there is any way to get to Oakland airport today. Nope, nada. How about another Bay Area airport? Nothing. The best they can do is put me on a Saturday flight arriving after the scheduled close of the first day of my workshop. How about other airlines? "We don't work with other airlines."    So I cancel and am told I can retrieve my checked luggage at the ticket counter downstairs. I stop at other airline desks on the way. "Can you do some magic and get me to Oakland today?" I ask a United lady. "I don't do magic well, " she demurs. However she tries. "IF only you had come an hour ago," she says, "we had one seat then." But an hour earlier Southwest had me captive upstairs. Same story with other airlines.    No seat available on any itinerary that will get me to the Bay Area today. Not even when i offer to pay for first class at staggering cost. I am willing to do this because i don't want to let down the 40 wonderful dreamers who have signed up for my weekend workshop in Berkeley. How am I going to explain to them that I have to cancel? I'm afraid I am starting to lose my sense of humor and this always a very dangerous situation.    At the Southwest ticket counter, a nice Earth Mother with Ireland in her face hears my story and goes to look for my bag. When she comes back with it, I try again, "I wish you could do some magic." "I'd love to do magic for you," she says.
    Another lady at a computer shakes her head. No seats. "Let me look." The lady who's ready to do magic takes over and finds a seat that wasn't there two minutes ago. So I am scheduled to get to Oakland at 11 pm, just six hours late, in good time to launch our adventure in Dreaming with Jung. Magic happens, especially when you are open to it and invite it, even when The Bringer of Confusions is in the field. And it seems that Earth Mother trumps the Trickster.
    However, Trickster is always in play. Coyote Man greets me at the door of my new plane several hours later. I recognize him at once. Tall, lean, hungry, sharp-nosed, keen-eyed with a scraggly red beard on his pointy chin and spikes of red hair standing up on his head. The flight attendant confirms my impression by laying jokes on us - some dreadful, some funny - for much of the flight. Southwest is notorious for cabin crew who play stand up comics, but this one is outrageous and incorrigible.    We get to Chicago Midway on time. Before I step off the plane in search of my connection, I say, "Thank you, Coyote Man,"
    He's intrigued. "Tell me about coyote."    "Trickster, comic, sometimes too tricky for his own good."
    "I'll take that as a compliment."
    "Go study Coyote," I suggest and then add, "No wait. You embody him."

Safe landing at Oakland airport after 19 hours in airport/airline Bardo, arriving at midnight instead of 5 pm. Surrounded on my last flight by 113 young musicians in a school orchestra en route to play Fantasia at Disneyworld. The shapes of the luggage on the carousel in baggage claim were a wonder.

The Bardo of Air Travel

I lead group shamanic journeys to an airport that won't be found on any ordinary map. They leave their bags, check in, go through security and board a plane that will take them to a destination where the dead are alive. Instructions for this crossing to the Other Side are in my book The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. During my air travels over the weekend, I sometimes felt that I had stepped into my own dream scenario, or that it had spilled into my world - or that, at least, I had been cast in a new episode of The Twilight Zone.

1

The Shakespeare Seat in the Twilight Zone

There is a woman in front of me at the airline desk where I am waiting to check in for my flight to Atlanta on Friday morning. The airline agent who is checking her in says to me, “You two are traveling together, right?”

    I tell her No but she doesn’t believe me. “He’s kidding,” she says to the woman passenger. “You two are together, yes?”
    “Sorry," I amplify. "This lady seems very nice but we don’t know each other.”
    “I was sure you were together.”
     “Are you looking for a career as a matchmaker? My wife won’t like it.”
     “Neither will my husband,” smiles the woman passenger.
     A male airline agent intervenes to take my bag and issue my boarding pass. "You got the Shakespeare seat," he congratulates me. I don’t get it until he says my seat number out loud. "2B."  
     I catch up to the stranger the other agent wanted to make my wife. She has a broad, open face and sensible shoes. She looks ready for a genteel country walk, or to give a tutorial.
    "I need to know who you are," I tell her. "The airline agent was so keen to play matchmaker that there must be some connection."
     "I'm a vertebrate paleontologist," the stranger tells me brightly. She helps me out by adding, "I study dinosaurs."
   "So we have something in common. I tell my psychology friends that I am a Paleolithic psychologist."
    I check my cellphone and a cartoon pops up on my Facebook news feed. It shows two dinosaurs in bed. One of them is saying, “I had a nightmare that I was small, frail, covered in feathers and fluttering through the air.”
    I show this to the Vertebrate Paleontologist and we exchange our website information. I distantly recall an episode of the old TV series "The Twilight Zone" in which the people on an airplane are thrown back across time. As I recall, the episode ends with a glimpse of a grazing sauropod dinosaur, and no resolution. You never know when you might need expert advice on a dinosaur situation.

In the line for the security check, I notice a key on the floor, just the one key. I wave it at a TSA agent, “Someone dropped a key.”
    The young man in front of me whips around and gapes. “That’s mine.” When I hand it to him he says, “That’s the key to my girlfriend’s apartment. You just saved my life, man.”
     The airport public address system is busy this morning, with announcements about other things left at the security check. In ascending order of strangeness: a jacket, a belt, a cell phone, a driver's license, a passport, a purple cane and one shoe. How do you leave behind one shoe? This only records the visible things missing from people in my airport Bardo today.

After I take my Shakespeare seat on the plane, the airline agent who tried to marry me to the Vertebrate Paleontologist rushes down the aisle and spills two pens in my lap. Certainly I can write two things at once.

   While they de-ice the plane, I ponder what it means to me today to be in what the airline guy called the Shakespeare seat. These lines from Polonius in Hamlet return to me:

This above all - to thine own self be true:

And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

2B or not 2B, sure. How about 2C? When I look across the aisle from my Shakespeare seat, the fellow in 2C is doing amazing things with a salad in a clear round plastic container he has brought on board. He spins it between his palms like a wheel, he shakes it, he spins it a different way. I get that he's trying to get the dressing nicely mixed with the leaves but this goes on for ten minutes. It seems this is his version of spinning a Tibetan prayer wheel or doing asanas.
    I wait until we are landing before asking him what was in the salad dressing. "I've never seen Salad Yoga before." He tells me it's a Thai dressing from Panera, an "intense" experience. Evidently.

Settled into my seat, I am rereading the Bhagavad Gita while sipping a gin and tonic. I am distracted by what is going on in the row in front of me. Sarah Sanders is sitting in the window seat. A hyena-like younger man is chatting her up. Their conversation gets louder as they toss back free drinks. Now they're talking about online dating and what lies it's okay to tell intimate partners before and after dumping said partners.
   Am I dreaming? No. But I realize this is not the Sarah of the briefing room but a lookalike of her possible future self, ten years older and thirty pounds heavier.
    As we get ready to disembark, I say to her, "Thanks for the entertainment."
    She blushes to the roots of her hair. "You mean you could hear us?"
   "Every word. But I decided not to record you this time."
  

2

Night Flight from Atlanta

I look behind me and there she is again, the mountainous woman in the Zulu hat, coming down the ramp. I step on board the plane and the flight attendant takes my coat, as he did before.

    "Sorry to bother you again," says the man who needs me to stand up so he can sit in the window seat. He fires up his computer and starts watching the same old movie he was watching before.

    The man who is going to sit behind me fumbles with stuff in the overhead compartment and I brace myself in case he lets something fall on my shoulder as he did before. But he catches it this time, pats my shoulder and says, "Good thing I knew what was going to happen."

    "We've met before," the man across the aisle says to the woman next to him. She says, "In your dreams."

    These are vignettes from the Bardo of my air travel during my trip home from Atlanta on Monday night. The first plane broke. They found us another plane, unbroken but otherwise identical, where we took the same seats we had before. It was deja vu all over again. People were blurry, taking off after midnight, 2 1/2 hours late. Hard not to feel we were in a Twilight Zone episode in which things go on repeating until you wake up to the fact that you are dreaming, or dead, or both.

Photo: William Shattner in the 1963 Twilight Zone episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"