Dreams meet under lion's blue eyes at Amsterdam airport

Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam en route to Bucharest

I embarked on the long journey from my little home airport in upstate New York to Bucharest on Monday. Thanks to a flight cancellation, I was following a quite different itinerary than the one I had booked long ago. It would give me a layover at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport instead of at Paris Charles de Gaulle. The unexpected Amsterdam connection was tagged by delicious poetic synchronicity, as I noted in my last article in this space.
    So now my antennae are all quivering, because when your plans get screwed up, the Trickster comes into play. There is a kind of tilt to the day. Chance encounters may be fascinating, if you are open to them. You are aware that you are traveling paths that were not on your maps, beyond the settled lands of Planning and Calculation.
    I enjoy my conversations with the first fellow-travelers I meet. They are both men who love beer and have a seemingly endless supply of factoids about craft brewing, alcohol content, hops and more - and have clearly both looked in a beer mug or two when it was brown. I like beer, so I was happy to chime in with some preferences and stories of my own.
    The sharp edge of both conversations emerged through this froth. Both men had well-paid jobs that did more than pay the bills but seemed to leave them gasping for air. I expressed my view that the trick in life is to do what you love and let the universe find a way to support that. Soon we were talking about what this would mean, in practice, for each of these increasingly conscious travelers. I led them through what I call the Juggling Act.
   "List the things you most love - it's okay to include beer! - and picture yourself holding these things in your left hand. Now list the skills, resources and connections you have, and see yourself balancing these in your right hand."
   We talked about how to shuffle together these two sets, of love objects and skills. No immediate business plans or flashes of divine lightning came through, but the exercise is fun and engaging.
    Now my plane is coming down through grey sea-mists over Amsterdam, a city below sea level. I have arrived a few minutes early, but there is still no time to be lost getting across the vast, bustling airport to my new departure gate, D54. I find a crowd of travelers waiting at the gate for the security check. A pretty younger woman glances at my boarding pass. "You are Flying Blue Silver," she telle me. "You don't have to wait with us. You can go to the front."
    I tell her I'll stay where I am in the line. There's no rush. She's Romanian, I guess. Correct. She's going back to Cluj to continue her studies as a medical student. She loves to travel the world and she especially likes Amsterdam.
    The conversation quickly takes off. When she completes her medical training, she wants to be an oncologist. Soon we are talking about the role of imagery in healing cancer. The importance of imaginal healing is now well-recognized in oncology, the field she has chosen. "If you can help a cancer patient to see and sense and believe in an ally who can help them fight the disease inside their body, they do better." Under questioning, I explain that this is the kind of thing I train people to do.
    She wants to know about my trainings, and my books. I mention my book Active

Dreaming. She whips out her smartphone to find the American edition online. She wants to read in in English. She gasps when she sees the cover - a fierce lion door knocker that is really in your face, hinting that if you want to get to the good stuff, you need to brave up.
   "Last night, I dreamed of a lion with blue eyes and a white mane, in a swimming pool."
   I don't comment that I am have loved lions all my life and that I am a big cat who loves to swim. I do tell her that my working title for this book was The Place of the Lion, and that it contains my story of a big dream in which a lion advised me on how to approach life.
   I show her the cover of my spiritual memoir The Boy Who Died and Came Back, which has beautiful endorsements from two exceptional M.D.s who are helping us to remember and grow the spirit-body connection: Raymond Moody and Larry Dossey.
    Her eyes widen. "This conversation is a gift to me," she tells me. "I've been thinking a lot about death, and what happens after death." She explains that a good friend died, with his girlfriend, in the Malaysian Airlines plane that was shot down over eastern Ukraine. I ask if she has had a sense of his presence.
    "I've been dreaming of him almost every night."
    "How is he doing?"
    "He's fine. Last time I saw him, he was leading me up a ladder. I was behind him, and his girlfriend was behind me. The ladder was not an ordinary ladder. It was an oak tree. I don't know where we were going, but this felt important, and wonderful."
     I told her that the very first time I taught in Eastern Europe, I guided a group of fifty people to journey with the aid of shamanic drumming through the portal of an oak tree. For shamans, I explained, any tree can be a ladder between the worlds, an axis mundi. However, for many of us of European ancestry, the oak has special importance. Druids, for example, were called oak seers.
     Truth comes with boosebumps. Synchronicity is the spice of travel, and a way of knowing that you are on the right path even when the daily trivial mind might try to tell you that you are off schedule or off track.  
    

The green seer

She could see the great oak wood from the garden, swelling into curves of deep green above yellow gorse and gray heather and the flat wheat fields. In the night, she listened to the wind playing the forest like a harp. When she was tending the flock, she often let the sheep wander towards the oak wood on the hill. Sometimes, escaping from chores, she joined other girls in tracking one of the fevered or rheumy pilgrims who struggled up the hill in hopes of healing at the ancient spring. It was more fun to follow the young men and women who made love nests in the woods, bedding down on heaped leaves. Sometimes the young bucks brought antlers to hang on the branches, to invoke the unquenchable ardor of the true stag in his season.

At the heart of the oak wood, on the crest of the hill, was a grove of beeches. One beech towered above the others. Though its roots showed through the soil, like raised veins on an old woman’s hand, this tree had survived wind and storm for countless generations. There were people who feared this tree, and saw living serpents in the sinuous weavings of its roots.

Everyone knew it was a place of the Old Ones. It was whispered that the fairies still danced around the tree at the great turnings of the wheel of the year, especially around May Day and All Hallows. The water of the spring was the gift of an ancient power of the land. It soothed away fevers, rinsed off blemishes of the skin, and gave the gift of vision and inspiration.

     She loved to touch the skin of this tree, smooth and silvery. While a nearby oak was clearly male - fierce and craggy with limbs thrown out in a boxer’s stance – the great beech, rounded and silky, was plainly female. The Lady Tree she was called in the village. To the seer, the tree herself was a lady.

The Lady Tree was loveliest in her springtime unfolding, when her reddish buds opened to release fresh soft leaves of pale and vital green. Her sex came alive on the same branches, the tasseled catkins quivering on their long stalks, the flower-balls putting up delicate tendrils that waved in the air, seeking pollen.

As spring ripened into summer, the Lady Tree dressed herself in heavier and darker greens. Under her canopy, it was cool and shady on the warmest day. Yet through the dark came bursts of brilliant light that could catch you full in the face, as if a star had leaned down to touch you. When the breeze moved among the leaves, the lights danced, the veil of perception thinned, and airy things took substance.

Did the Lady first show herself in spring or summer? On in the fall, when the tree was dressed in russet and gold, and the deer munched fallen beech mast, savoring the oil, in between their courtship displays and the thrusting passion of the rut?

The eyes are spring green, and I will trust them.

They are the exact shade of the soft and vibrant green of the new leaves, the same green reflected in the spring water that bubbles into a stone basin under the beech. When I first saw those eyes, I was awed by the greenfire of growing things that glowed in them. The face in which they were set was nut-round and nut-colored, marked with a curious pattern of lines and dots. The top of her head was concealed by a tight cap.

The green eyes hold a history of the world, and memories of the future, that are deeper and different from those known to my kind.

In my awe and amazement, I did not realize until after that first encounter that it was not only her irises that were green. There are no whites to her eyes. Those eyes, huge as a deer’s, are entirely green.

Cycles move in them, and centuries. The fall of the leaf, and the fall of the antlers. And a secret forgotten among my kind, which we are yet mad to possess. Regeneration. The promise of growing green again.

Drawing: "The Green Seer" (c) Robert Moss

Soul Tree: Joining Earth and Heaven

We can’t lose our way if we go to the root of things, to the roots of a tree. By finding the right tree – a tree you know that also knows you – you can reconnect with the soul of nature. You can find grounding for soul in this world, and a shaman’s ladder to travel between the worlds.

      I once moved to a place in the country because of a tree, an old white oak behind the house that had survived the lightning. I knew it for a guardian of the land and a wise ancient. Sitting with that tree, I would have impressions of all the seasons it had lived. When I walked the farm road towards it, I would sometimes feel its silent greeting. Sometimes I watched the moon rise over the hills from up in its branches. The oak became a tree of my dreaming, and a portal to the ancestors. Rooted deep in American earth, the oak also joined me to the ways of oak seers of my bloodlines in the Old World, to the druids “grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed”, to the sacred oak at Dodona where the Greeks listened for the voice of a god in the creak and rustle of the branches. After the first snows, when the cold stung my eyes, I saw that the oak still hung onto its leaves, longer than any other shedding trees on that land. Oaks hang on.    
     What trees call to you, on country walks, or out of memory or dream? Any tree may be your soul tree, and it may also be your sole tree, the One Tree through which the three worlds of the shaman’s cosmos are joined, and which may become your ladder between them.
      At the start of most of my depth workshops, I lead a standing meditation in which each person in the circle finds the image of a special tree, and then lets the body take the form of that tree, rooted in Earth, rising between Earth and sky, feeding on sunfire. We let our bodies sway as we stand, as a tree will sway in a strong wind, giving a little in order not to be snapped. We see the seasons changing around us. We feel what it’s like to have a squirrel run up our trunk or to have birds nesting in our hair. As the meditation deepens, we feel ourselves reaching deep into the Earth, through the roots system, going deep and spreading wide. We feel, with our inner senses, how we can travel this way to connect with the animal powers, and with ancestral spirits, and to receive healing and blessing in the realm of the Great Earth Mother.
      Then we let our awareness ascend to the high branches. We picture ourselves perched up there like a bird, or a happy child in a tree house, able to look out in all directions from this excellent place of vision. We imagine that we can fly now to a person or place at a distance and look in on them and sometimes, quick as thought, we are there. We discover that from the place in the high branches, we can not only see across any distance in space, we can scout across time, and travel into the possible future to see what lies on the roads ahead for ourselves and others. This is something that tree seers have always been good at.
      Now we go higher, in the world of the tree. We feel ourselves rise up into the canopy, up to the green crown, and then feel ourselves rising up higher and higher until the sky opens and we are in the first of the many levels of the Upper World. We are on our way now to make or renew our connections with our authentic spiritual teachers.
    
Text adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Picture: "Dream Altar" by Siiri Liivandi. "A safe place," writes the Estonian artist, "to offer and generate dreams."