Birth of a Songline

 

A song is bursting from me. I sit on a rise overlooking the coast, and sing the first couplet:

We are singing till we're flying
We are flying till we're swimming

The last part comes in an easy flow

We are swimming till we're traveling
into the Land

A woman singer-songwriter is beside me now, carrying the melody in her lovely voice, laughing with me as I experiment with additional lines.

We are laughing till we're bouncing
We are bouncing till we're flying

Then comes the most important verse

We are sleeping till we’re dreaming
We are dreaming till awakening
We’re awakening for our homecoming
into the Land

I know what this is. It's a wing song, a journey song. I am excited to think that I can share it with the people who join me for adventures in the dreamtime and in the dream of everyday life.

I know what the Land of the song is. It is a happy Otherworld, a land of heart's desire. And the song can help to take us there. We are making songlines. 

- This account of how a song was born in one of my dreams is excerpt from my 2013 journal. We have sung the last verse of that song in many of my workshops and retreats, and it has helped us unfold our wings.

Photo (c) Romy Needham

Poets of consciousness

Poets, it’s said, are shamans of words. True shamans are poets of consciousness. Journeying into a deeper reality with the aid of sung and spoken poetry, they bring back energy and healing through poetic acts, shapeshifting physical systems. When we dream, we tap directly into the same creative source from which poets and shamans derive their gifts. When we create from our dreams, and enter dreamlike flow, we become poets and artists. When we act to bring the energy and imagery of dreams into physical reality, we become poets of consciousness and infuse our world with magic.

In Birth of a Poet, William Everson raised a clamorous appeal for poets to reawaken to their shamanic calling: "O Poets! Shamans of the word! When will you recover the trance-like rhythms, the subliminal imagery, the haunting sense of possession, the powerful inflection and enunciation to effect the vision? Shamanize! Shamanize!" Across the centuries, many of our greatest poets have recognized their kinship with the shaman’s way of shifting awareness and shapeshifting reality. As his name in a spiritual order, Goethe chose the name of a legendary shaman of antiquity, Abaris, who came flying out of the Northern mists on an arrow from Apollo’s bow.

Our earliest poets were shamans. Today as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal. They understand that through the play of words, sung or spoken, the magic of the Real World comes dancing into the surface world. The right words open pathways between the worlds. The poetry of consciousness delights the spirits. It draws the gods and goddesses who wish to live through us closer. Shamans use poetry, sung or spoken, to achieve ends that go deeper than our consensual world. They create poetic songs of power to invoke spiritual help; to journey into nonordinary reality; to open and maintain a space between the worlds where interaction between humans and multidimensional beings can take place and to bring energy and healing through to the body and the physical world.

The South American paye takes flight with the help of "wing songs". These flight songs help him to borrow the wings of the kumalak bird [a kind of kite] that is a main ally of shamans. Among the Temiar-Senoi of the Malaysian rainforest, the great gift of a dream is the norng, or dream song, literally a "pathway" that can get you through the jungle or carry the soul to where it needs to go on either side of death.

Among the Inuit, the strongest shamans are also the most gifted poets. One of the reasons their spirit helpers flock around them is that they are charmed and exhilarated by the angakok’s poetic improvisations. Inuit shamans have a language of their own, which is often impenetrable to other Eskimos. It is a language that is never still. It bubbles and eddies, opening a whirlpool way to the deep bosom of the Sea-goddess, or a cavernous passage into the hidden fires of Earth.

My favorite Inuit shaman-word is the one for "dream". It looks like this: kubsaitigisak. It is pronounced "koov-sigh-teegee-shakk", with a little click at the back of the throat when you come to the final consonant. It means "what makes me dive in headfirst." Savor that for a moment, and all that flows with it. A dream, in Eskimo shaman-speech, is something that makes you dive in headfirst. Doesn’t this wondrously evoke the kinesthetic energy of dreaming, the sense of plunging into a deeper world? Doesn’t it also invite us to take the plunge, in the dream of life, and burst through the glass ceilings and paper barriers constructed by the daily trivial self?

Shamans know further uses for dream songs. They call the soul back home, into the bodies of those who have lost vital energy through pain or trauma or heartbreak. And from their journeys, they bring back poetic imagery that can help to shapeshift the body’s energy template in the direction of health.

Mainstream Western physicians agree that the body believes in images and responds to them as if they are physical events. By bringing the right images through from the dreaming, the poets of consciousness explain dis-ease in ways that help the patient get well, and interact with the body and its immune system on multiple levels without invasive surgery.

As dreamers, we tap into the same deep wells as poets and shamans and we climb ladders between the worlds. Poetry sometimes comes dancing out of dreams, in full-formed verses. When we turn our dreams into poems, we free our creative spirit, and our spirits come dancing.

Text adapted from Dreamways of the Iroquois by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books. 

Photo by RM

The song that is a road and the songs that come from the plant spirits.

 

You find the villages of the Temiar when a shady path through the rainforest opens out onto a field of hill rice or a clump of man-high tapioca plants. This people of the Malaysian rainforest live in the old way, by slash-and-burn agriculture, moving their thatched houses when their fields get tired. They live very close to their land. Their stilt houses are walled with bamboo poles, laid horizontally so there are gaps between them. There are also gaps between the bamboo slats of the floors. Earth and trees are always visible. No solid boundary is set between human settlement and the natural world.

It is not surprising that, in this setting, people have an intimacy with the Earth that colors and informs their dreams. They believe that everything is alive and conscious, and that in dreams human spirits, traveling outside the body, encounter spirits of plants and animals and mountains and rivers. There is great power in these encounters, especially when a tiger or a tree gifts the dreamer with a song that can later call in its energy for healing. A song of this kind, received in a dream and freighted with the power to summon an animal guardian, or wake a mountain, is called a norng, which literally means a “road”, or pathway. The kind of path that can get your body safely through the forest, or guide a soul to where it belongs.

I learned about the Temiar through the beautiful work of American musicologist and anthropologist Marina Roseman, who has not only recorded their dream songs but has sung in the women’s chorus when healers sing over a patient.  I have listened to her recording of a tiger dream song. It is thrilling. Above the tapping of bamboo sticks, you hear the gravelly voice of the tiger as he rises from a nap to become an ally in healing, by driving away a disease spirit, or lending his own fierce vitality to a sick person.

One of the songs Roseman translated reveals the process of acquiring a healing song from a plant spirit.  A man named Uda Pandak had been seeding and tending keralad plants, patting and shaping the earth around the roots. In the time when the keralad came into flower, he smelled its fragrance strongly inside a dream. After releasing its odor, the plant took human form and announced a spiritual connection with the dreamer.  “It is you that I want.” As a human, the plant now began to sing, giving the dreamer a new song for healing. Notice the stages in this process, which proceeds like the natural growth of fruit and flower. You make a connection in the natural world, by getting your hands in the earth, seeding and weeding. The plant releases its odor. Then its spirit morphs into human form, initiates conversation and finally produces the song.[1]

The ability to receive songs from spirit guides in dreams promotes a Temiar dreamer to the status of "a person with halaa", a powerful medium.  In the narrative of Uda Pandak, he did not ask for a song or a visitation by the plant spirit. However, he laid the ground by tending the earth around its roots. The keralad plant's "head soul" emerged of its own volition and met the "head soul"of the dreamer. Interestngly, Roseman found that Temiar, for the most part, do not request songs from the spirits. They believe that the spirits will come spontaneously when they are living close to the earth and respecting life upon it.

1. Marina Roseman, Healing Songs from the Malaysian Rainforest.: Temiar Music and Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 52-58.

Text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Check Your Inner Soundtrack

Do you check your inner soundtrack, as you wake and at other times during the day? Do you notice how this can set the mood for the day, for good or otherwise? Do certain songs, popping up in your mind, connect you to certain people, life themes or memories? Do you find you sometimes need to change what's playing inside your head?

    This is a very effective way of checking your attitude, including thoughts and feelings you may be carrying that have not risen to your full awareness but may condition or even control what you will encounter in the course of the day. You know, don't you, that your attitude walks ahead of you, helping to generate events and encounters around the next corner.This is because you are magnetic. Unfortunately, however, you are often less than fully conscious of what you attract and repel -until and unless you look back carefully on a certain episode and begin to discern its hidden logic.
    Checking your inner soundtrack is an easy way to check your attitude. I do this several times a day. It might start effortlessly because I wake with a snatch of a song in my head. This is may carry a mood from a dream, or part of the soundtrack of a dream movie, or may anticipate the mood of the day. It may connect me to people or places at a distance, or a certain period of my life. 
      When I am lucky, a song from the night may be an original composition. I will then spring into action to try to record it before it is gone. Like the dreamers of many indigenous traditions, I know that a dream-inspired song is one of the great gifts of dreaming. It can be a way to bring through energy and spirit from a deeper place. It can be a wing song that will help you travel from the ordinary world into real worlds beyond it.     
      A Texas woman told me,  “I wake up with different music every day. Today I woke up with "Shake it Off" by Taylor Swift. In the dream I was watching a sad news story on television. I have not heard that song in a long time. I took it as a message to keep a good attitude during the day, focus my attention on positive things and shake off the bad stuff coming though the TV.”      
     A Vancouver dreamer said, “Today I accept the song that was with me when I woke and I will let it play all day. ‘Calling All Angels’.”     
     The song on your inner soundtrack may connect you to another person in your life, maybe someone at a distance. A friend told me that a song she used to sing for her son when he was very small will still pop into her head when he is thinking of her and getting ready to call her or visit her. The song is “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands.” She smiles when it starts playing on her inner soundtrack, remembering the joy of slapping hands with her little boy as he tried to reproduce the words.     
    When you check your inner soundtrack, don’t just listen to the music, find the words that may or may not come with a tune. Check for voices from the past that may be cheering you on or bringing you down. Catch yourself when you start going over and over old histories of failure or regret, belittling yourself, telling yourself what’s wrong with you in a way that cannot help you to be right. You may notice that an inner voice has been repeating things like, “I’m such an idiot” or, “I’m in so much pain” or “I’ll never be able to face that crowd, or that person”.      
     Your inner soundtrack may include a whole chorus of voices of people who have lifted you up or pulled you down. Don’t let all of them speak! Choose the ones you are willing to hear.         Above all, check your personal mantras. These are codes for connection and manifestation. These are the magic words that can deform your life or open up avenues of bright possibility. You may have borrowed some of your personal mantras from a spiritual teacher, or a favorite book, or one of those oh-so-cute boxes in your Facebook newsfeed. 
    I have nothing against feel-good affirmations and statements of spiritual correctness, as long as they work. This means that they come to mind when you need them, when you need to respond to a challenge or make a choice at a crossroads. It means that they are playing on your inner soundtrack before you hit a select button.     
    When you check your inner soundtrack, you may find that your personal mantras include:     
    “I’m sick.”     
    “I’m fat.”     
    “I’ll never meet the right guy.”    
    “I’ll never have enough money.”    
     There’s no need for me to expand the list. You want to make your own. When you detect a negative mantra of this kind on your inner playlist, you can try to delete it, but may find that it comes back. You can try to override it with happy tunes and feel-good affirmations. I find that sometimes the best tactic is not to try to cancel a long-playing blues number right away, but to trip lightly around it, saying and singing better numbers.     
     Walking my dog in the park one morning, I checked my inner soundtrack and found I was engaged in making an inventory of the complaints in my aging body, all featuring pain. The pain in my dodgy knee, the pain in my shoulder, the pain of inflammation in one of my toes, the possible beginnings of a sore throat.     
     I hit my inner pause button. I did not try to deny that my body was expressing these complaints, and might need to be acknowledged. We don’t want to push away what may be part of our body wisdom, or — in my case — my body crying out for a little TLC. All I did was shift my attention to the dappled light among the beech trees, the gentle breeze stirring the surface of the lake and playing with my hair, the happiness of my little dog as he nosed after new smells and the nether parts of other dogs. And I said to the wind and the sun and the trees, “Thank you. Thank you for the gift of this day, for being able to walk among trees, by water, with a dog who loves me no matter what. Thank you for the gifts and the challenges of this lifetime.”     
    The best answer to inner naysayers and whiners may be to say to the universe: Thank you. 

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss.Published by New World Library.

Turning a dream into a song

Early Franciscan missionaries among the Caddo Hasinai of East Texas reported that dreams were valued highly among this people, and that it was common to recount a dream by turning it into a song. Stories sung or spoken with poetic rhythm are more likely to be implanted in memory that ones delivered in rambllng or halting prose.

    A dream may be turned into song. It may also deliver a song. In many other indigenous cultures, a  new song is considered to be one of the greatest gifts of dreaming. Power songs used for shamanic dreaming may come in this way. A song with the power to heal may come from a spiritual ally - the spirit of a plant or an animal, a river or a supernatural being - communicating in dreams. Among the Temiar Senoi of the Malayan rainforest, a dream song is called a norng, which literally means a "roadway". The dream song opens a path through the forest of life, and a path for souls on both sides of death to find their right place.

Source: On Franciscan reports of Caddo dreaming, see Carla Gerona, “Flying Like an Eagle: Franciscan and Caddo Dreams and Visions” in Anne Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle (eds) Dreams, Dreamers and Visions: The Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) 125.

Painting of Hasinai village from Texas Historical Commission website.

Praise and Serve the Mother and Re-enchant the World

I am walking in deep, springy grass, humming a little hum, a bit like Winnie-the-Pooh.. Ahead of me, near a fine lake, is a great tree, and I know that important things are waiting for me if only I can open a door among the roots of this tree. In fact, I need to do this very much, because people are looking to me for direction I can only find if I go down to a world below the great tree. I can see their faces - the faces of decent family people in ordinary situations, all over. They are doing their best, but they need something more. 

     I understand that I can only gain access to the place where the guidance they need can be found by putting words to my hum. By finding the song that will be the key.

I wake from this dream with the hum in my mind, but not much more, beyond a sense of urgency. 

     I call a dear friend, Carol, who has companioned me in many adventures in dream travel and dream teaching. I ask her to come over and drum for me while I attempt to reenter my dream and find the song key.

     Soon we are together. I am stretched out on the rug, eyes closed, humming the hum I recall. As Carol gently taps the drum, words begin to come:

I am walking on the Mother
I am sailing on her skin

"Sailing" on her skin? A critical, editing part of my mind natters that this can hardly be correct. I ask that part of me to wait outside while I go on with this. Let me have this adventure and I'll talk to you later. (This, in my experience, is the best way to deal with the skeptic in the left brain, who has his place but must be reminded where that its.) As Carol  continues to drum, the first stanza becomes whole:

I am walking on the Mother
I am sailing on her skin
I become her child and lover
from the outside enter in

Now the flow is coming stronger, unstoppable:

I will praise the sky above her
I will praise her in the deep
I am dreaming of the Mother
she awakens me from sleep

Walk lightly on the Mother
and let her grace unfold

Praise and serve the Mother

and re-enchant the world

Oh, I need to hear those last lines again:

Praise and serve the Mother

and re-enchant the world

Now, in my lucid wide-awake dream, I am approaching the roots of the great tree. An opening appears, like a door, and I go through it without hesitation. I go down into a velvety, breathing dark. Then a great shape, formed of the Earth itself, takes form and embraces me. I am enfolded within the body of the Great Mother. She holds me and nurses me like a baby, and I feel love and healing coursing through every part of my body.

     Now I am allowed to go deeper, into a kind of Creative Cave in a world below our world of appearances. Here I find powerful guidance and direction, to be shared with those who have been waiting.

     When I signal for Carol to end the drumming, I have the song, and the directions. I recall that in the Mohawk language (which I was obliged to learn because of my dreams) the word for "song" - ka'renna - literally means, "I am putting forth my power."

I have shared the song of the Mother gathering of active dreamers in special places. When we sing the chorus together, we know we are on our way, to "re-enchant the world." I shared it in my last class for my current online"Quantum Dreaming" course for The Shift Network, and saw the doors to the deeper world opening again.

 Art: "Tree Crossroads of Worlds" by Annick Bougerolle