Speaking Land

 

The easiest way to understand synchronicity is the oldest. We live in a conscious universe, where everything is alive, everything is connected, everything has spirit. Early peoples say that humans are the animals that tell stories about all the others, but this does not mean that humans are the only ones talking. Birds speak in complex languages, bees are great communicators and their drone or hum is the sound that humans often hear when their inner senses are opening. A stone can speak, though it may lie dormant and silent until approached in the right way. A river or a mountain can speak. Thunder is louder than any human could speak until people started making things that can blow up cities.
     The Aborigines of my native Australia say that we live in a Speaking Land where everything is speaking. How much we can hear depends on how we use our senses, both inner and outer. How much we can use and understand depends on selection, on grasping what matters.
      While the world around us is alive and spirited, it is also the playground or boxing ring for spirits whose home is in other realities. Some have been worshipped as gods, invoked as angels or feared as demons, and still are by many. A passage in the Puranas informs us that there are forty thousand orders of beings, humanoid to human perception, that are within contact range of humans. They may be friendly, hostile or inimical to humans and human agendas.
      The air is thickly settled, as they say on New England road signs, with spirits of the dead. Some are bound to certain places. Some are hitchhikers, getting around by riding the living. Some are visitors dropping in for the night. Some are commuters from the astral realm of the Moon. They may have been promoted to the rank of daimon and given responsibility, under the supervision of higher intelligences, for watching, counseling, or intervening in the lives of people on Earth.
      From this very ancient and primal perspective, it’s all personal. 


Photo by RM

Under the Blue White Rainbow

 

I have heard Aboriginal elders say that spirits that are getting ready to come into a body lie in wait in certain waters, waiting for the right opportunity. I think stories can be like that. Even when you think you have left a certain story behind, it may be waiting for you, seeking an opportunity to enter you and come alive in you again.

 A certain story has been after me since my first visit to Hawaii, back in 1998, and I'll be glad if it comes after me again.

 During my first days in Hawaii, I found myself in a waking dream. The whole landscape was so vividly alive. Early on the morning of my birthday, I swam at Waimea Beach, on the wild north shore of Oahu, under gentle rain. Leaning towers of cloud and mist rose from the gorge behind the beach. A woman in a wetsuit was going down to the water; her hair was golden seaweed. From the water’s edge, the ocean floor slanted down sudden and deep. I slid into warm, gentle surf.

 I was delighted by a rainbow that appeared to be anchored half a mile away, to my left, by a rocky headland. The rainbow curved over the sea, opening a gateway – bluegreen to begin with, brightening as the sun burst through into the full, vivid spectrum.

 I wanted to swim under the rainbow. It looked like a gate to another dimension. I struck out strongly, beating my legs, towards the rainbow gate. When I raised my chin above the water to check on my progress, I found the rainbow was steadily receding into the distance. Everyone knows you can’t ever catch up with a rainbow, right?

 But now the sea turtles came. First a baby, then a whole pod. I swam among them, kicking hard to keep up. Sea turtles can be fast. 

We swam together to the place of the rainbow. Its brightness had gone, yet something of it seemed to hang in the air. I saw a beautiful soft bluegreen arch above me.

I wrote sloppy haiku on the beach. The woman with seaweed hair approached me.

"I saw you swimming with the sea turtles."

"Yes."

"I am a caller of sea turtles," she announced, quite matter-of-factly. I did not doubt her. "Are you a poet?" she asked me.

 "Sometimes."

She asked me to read what I had written. How do you refuse a caller of sea turtles with golden seaweed for hair?

I want to go under
The rainbow’s ocean gate
Sea turtle takes me through

I returned to Hawaii the following year, and on another early morning, when I was alone on a white beach in early sunlight farther along the coast, a shark came out of the gentle surf and became a woman.

Life rhymes. When I first started teaching public workshops in Active Dreaming, the venue was often a store called Blue White Rainbow. 

 Years passed, and I began to write a novel-length story involving a man whose idea of paradise is a lot like Hawaii; not surprising, since the word Hawaii, I am told, is a contraction of Hawaiiki, a Polynesian term for paradise. So when he dies, my character finds himself traveling to a place like one of the Hawaiian islands where life after life is good until things start to fall apart because it's time for him to move on. I did not complete this book. It lies in a great pile of other unfinished manuscripts.

I am thinking of how stories may lie in wait in certain waters, like those spirits waiting to be born. I'll be happy if my Hawaiian story chooses to find me again.

Digital art by RM

Dream archaeology at Bandelier

Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico

I was staying outside Santa Fe in an adobe house with extraordinary views across desert and mountains. The phrase Big Sky really applies here - you can watch the weather rolling in from fifty miles away. The night sky is extraordinary, a grainy, pulsing field full of animate energies. Nature feels quite personal here.

    I went out to the Bandelier State Monument, to visit the sites of the ancient and mysterious Anasazi people. I had two of those encounters with spirits of the land of the kind that are the stuff of dream archaeology.
    On the trail to the falls, I felt the mountain lion energy very strongly. Further along the trail, I lay down under ponderosa pines. I immediately sensed a presence. Scanning with my inner senses, I tracked it. Among the trees, a little person took form. He was very dark-skinned and no more than four feet tall. He was willing to give me a name, speaking the five syllables slowly and distinctly, so I could pick them up. I will not publish his name here; traditional peoples are very sensitive about the power of names.
    The name and the nature of the little man were connected with Rabbit. He could run like a jackrabbit. I saw him hunting small animals a long time ago, living very close to the earth. I asked to enter his Dreamtime and slipped inside the world of the animals. He belonged to a time when human and animal consciousness were not as separate as they are today, and when forms were not fixed. He seemed to be able to shapeshift his physical body as well as his energy profile into animal forms. I was attracted by his simplicity. There was even a sense of innocence in the just-so-ness of his relations with the land.
     I encountered a different presence as I stood  in front of the petroglyphs at the “longhouse” site - apartments built into the talus of a volcanic cliff - at the Anasazi village. A Gatekeeper figure emerged. He told me that white people still know next to nothing about what really went on here, but that he would show me certain things, under certain conditions.
    The wall opened to my vision like a window. I looked into the scene of an ancient rainmaking ceremony. The priest held up and vibrated a large stuffed serpent while a helper made the sound of thunder crashing with something resembling a mortar and pestle. I was shown the methods this ancient people used for appealing directly to the animate forces of nature. My tour expanded. I enjoyed looking into the everyday lives of these ancient ones, their foods and cooking methods, their rituals and their delight in theater and music.
     I recalled that the First Peoples of my native Australia talk of the Speaking Land. The spirits of the land are talking, talking. All we need to do expand our awareness, and listen without judgment. I felt privileged to have been invited into a space between the worlds to learn the ways of two ancient peoples of the American Southwest.

- from my dream archaeology casebook (2001).

Jackrabbit photo by Jim Harper

Learning the language of the birds, Australian syle

“Nothing is nothing”, they say in the Cape York peninsula. Everything speaks of something else, and to something else. The spirit world and the physical world are interfused. The distance between them is the width of an eyelid, and no distance at all if the strong eye is open.
     You know when it is the right time to do something by listening to the land, by recognizing those things that like to happen together. The Yolngu of the Northern Territory know when food is ready to be gathered in certain places because they notice things that like to happen at the same time. When flower blooms in one place you know it is time to harvest in another. When that tree blossoms you know the yams in another spot are ripe and ready to eat. You do not check the calendar for the date of that big initiation ceremony; you know it’s about time when a certain fish is jumping in the river, big and fat.

     You learn that the birds are a whole telephone system. Night hunting birds, like owls, are powerful spirits whose call can mean that someone close to you is about to die. Listen carefully to the kingfisher, who lent wings to Jung’s Philemon. Kingfisher can see ghosts. If it calls out ekwe, ekwe, ekwe, watch out for a ghost attack that could inflict illness or even death.

     Little willie wagtail is a shaman of shamans among the bird tribes, He dances like a made man in ceremony when he jitters sideways. Watch willie wagtail for any unusual behavior, because this means news is coming. “Him good telephone that fella,” a Ngarrindjeri woman of the Lower Murray told Philip Clarke, who has been helping to map the Aboriginal landscape. *
     Listen to water as well as earth, to the voices in a billabong, to the song of a river. Today the indigenous fishermen of the Torres Islands see and feel the “scars on the water” caused by boat propellers and pollutants. Their shaman, the zogo le, flies on the wings of sea eagle, and sees with his keen eyes.

*Philip Clarke, Where the Ancestors Walked: Australia as an Aboriginal Landscape. (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2003) 23.

Photo: Sacred kingfisher (Todiramphus sanctus). Australian Museum

The Speaking Land

Everything is speaking to you.
The tarot Fool is out of the deck
and walking up the drive
with the patterns of the world in his sack
to remind you (if you’ll listen)
that to be wise you may need to be crazy
in the eyes of others, but don’t confuse this
with behaving like a bloody fool.

The chickens in the yard can teach you
multiplication and what you need
to hatch that dragon's eggs you have inside.
Hawk will come over, more interested in you
than a chicken dinner. Are you ready
so soar on his wings, and claim his vision
and see your life roads from his sky?

Everything is conspiring to show you
what heaven and earth want to happen.
When you think your way is lost,
when there are mountains of glass
and concrete between you and your dreams,
the ones who move beyond the curtain
of our consensual hallucinations
and speak as the wind in the trees
as the call of a bird, as the bark of a fox
will open ways where you least expect them.
All you need are new ears and fresh eyes.

I used this poem as the prologue for my book Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life, and you'll find much guidance there on how to grow your poetic health and walk consciously in the Speaking Land, in a forest of living symbols that are looking at you.

Art: Dorothy Englander, "Dream Path II"

Dreaming in scary times

Yes, these are scary times and this is a scary world. So what do you do, as an active dreamer?

1. Practice, practice, practice

That means catching your dreams whenever you can, and recording them in your journal. The world may seem to be going crazy, but you don't have to go crazy with it. Through dreams, your deeper self and sources of wisdom and healing beyond ordinary reality are seeking you. Be available.
    This applies to how you enter the day, as well as how you open to the night. As the Aborigines say, you live in the Speaking Land, and if you will only pay attention, you will receive guidance through special moments when you receive a nod, or a secret handshake, or a push-back from what is going on around you.

2. Be a dream ambassador

Learn our simple and powerful way of sharing dreams and life stories - the Lightning Dreamwork game - and practice it with anyone who has a dream or story to share. They will be amazed, and grateful, to discover that it is so easy to create a safe space to share these essential things, offer feedback and helpful suggestions on how to take action to embody guidance from a deeper reality, and have FUN - all in a few minutes.
   We can help each other in this way to hear the voice of soul, which is always speaking in dreams, and to hear the voice of conscience, which the hollow men, driven by power and greed, try to shut out. We may not be able to put soul and conscience back in the hollow men overnight, but we can sustain each other and grow light between us that will become a hearth fire and a guiding beacon on the darkest days, and will cast an ever-widening glow.

3. Set appropriate filters

If you find yourself afflicted by dreams that show you terrible things that may be happening, or may be going to happen, in the country or the world, choose what you are willing to handle. I do this, quite often, by setting the following intention for the night: 

Show me what I need to see.

    Let me say right away that in terms of your personal life, it may take some pluck to receive what may come as a result. Your dream producers may show you aspects of yourself or where you are headed that you would rather not contemplate.
    The larger issue here is: how much of developing dramas in the nation or the world do you really need to see? The answer will depend on how you are willing and able - or not - to use the dream-sourced information.
    We are connected to all that is human, and indeed to all animate life, so in the normal course of things we will intuit, especially in dreams (when the skeptic in the left brain lies dormant) coming events that affect all, whether we want to see them or not. For sanity and survival, it is important not to be open to taking on everything. We need to focus on receiving what we need to know and can apply in helpful ways. The content and the spectrum of information will depend on who we are and what we can do with it. A journalist or a social activist may want to know – and be primed to act upon – kinds of information that would simply depress and burden a dreamer in a different life situation.

4. Activist dreaming

So you don't want to remain passive in the face of developments that are threatening many things you hold dear and even the fabric of democracy and decent community. Then set careful intentions for the night, maybe along general lines, like this:

Show me how I can best contribute to peace and healing

Or along very specific lines, like:

How can I help sustain funding for the arts?

If you are an activist, you are part of a community, and you want to learn - if you don't know this already - how to practice community dreaming.

5. Community dreaming

We can dream as communities, and we can dream consciously, and no good intention is every wasted. A circle of thirty active dreamers, meeting with me in a special gathering after the U.S. presidential election, wanted to journey – with the help of shamanic drumming – five years into the possible future to see how things looked then, in our personal and family lives, in our dreaming community, and in the world. We were surprised and relieved to find that, at least for the United States, things had come out okay. The next president was a woman (not Hillary). There had been many scares and upheavals along the way, but we did not dwell on the details.

          Any future we can foresee is of course only a possible or probable future, and I draw only limited solace from that glimpse of a possible outcome.
    In my book Active Dreaming I give simple directions for community dreaming. This can be done by bringing a group together to journey on an agreed intention with the aid of shamanic drumming. It can also be done through dream incubation, which means that everyone in the group agrees to set an common intention for the night and then comes ready to share reports in the morning. 
  

Nine keys to living consciously in the multiverse

1

The only time is Now. All other times - past, present and parallel - can be accessed in this moment of Now, and may be changed for the better.

2

We dream to wake up. Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It is about waking up to a deeper order of reality. Dreaming is a discipline; to get really good at it requires practice, practice, practice.

3

Treasures are waiting for us in the Place Between Sleep and Awake. The easiest way to become a lucid or conscious dreamer is to spend more time in the twilight zone between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking.  Tinker Bell told Peter Pan to look for her in the Place between Sleep and Awake. This liminal state is a place of encounter with inner guides and transpersonal visitors. It is also a place of heightened psychic perception and creative breakthroughs, where it is easy to make connections that escape the daily mind.

4

We live in the Speaking Land, as the First Peoples of my native Australia say. Everything in the world around us is alive and conscious and will speak to us if we are paying attention. Navigating by synchronicity becomes very simple, even irresistible, when we stream into this mode of understanding.

5

To live well, we must practice death. We bring courage and clarity to life choices when we are aware that death is always with us, and that we should be ready to meet it any day.

6

We must feed and honor our animal spirits. A working connection with them gives us immense resources for self-healing.

7

We have a guide for our lives who is no stranger. He is always with us and does not judge us. This is the Self on a higher level. When we rise to the perspective of the Greater Self, we are able to make peace between different personality aspects, including our counterparts in other times and parallel realities.

8

We are at the center of all times. The dramas of lives being lived in other times and in parallel realities may be intensely relevant to understanding and navigating our current relationships and life issues. We can learn to reach into those other lives to share gifts and lessons. We can dialog with our own older and younger selves within our present lifetimes.

9

We must entertain the spirits, starting with our very own – the child self, the inner artist, the passionate teen, the animal spirits, the creative daimon.

Adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

At Epiphany, a poem is the key

My first dream at Epiphany, the day of “showing forth”, for Christians the “theophany”, when the nature of God in Christ is revealed:

The Poem is the Key

I am in front of a screen that is a control panel. My task is to link various rectangular shapes. They are the size and shape of cards. I can click and drag them across the screen, and chart lines of connection between them. If I hit upon the right sequences, I will make magic, changing things in the world as well as on the screen.
     One of these rectangles contains a poem. If I lay my palm on the poem, everything goes right. All else is secondary. The poem is the trump, the master key. I am very happy because I have the poem. The rest will fall where it needs to be.

I rise from this dream charged with excitement, not least because I have already written the poem. 

The Speaking Land

Everything is speaking to you.
The tarot Fool is out of the deck
and walking up the drive
with the patterns of the world in his sack
to remind you (if you’ll listen)
that to be wise you may need to be crazy
in the eyes of others, but don’t confuse this
with behaving like a bloody fool.

The chickens in the yard can teach you
multiplication and what you need
to hatch that dragon's eggs you have inside.
Hawk will come over, more interested in you
than a chicken dinner. Are you ready
so soar on his wings, and claim his vision
and see your life roads from his sky?

Everything is conspiring to show you
what heaven and earth want to happen.
When you think your way is lost,
when there are mountains of glass
and concrete between you and your dreams,
the ones who move beyond the curtain
of our consensual hallucinations
and speak as the wind in the trees
as the call of a bird, as the bark of a fox
will open ways where you least expect them.
All you need are new ears and fresh eyes.

Morning star photo

You take the high road and I'll take the low road

You take the high road and I'll take the low road.
And I'll be in dreamland before you.

The way up is the way down.
Lower World, Middle World, Upper World. Go traveling like a shaman, and you might find the cosmos is not arranged like a layer cake.

Good morning, willow. I share your green yearnings.
Any tree may be the Tree of Life, whose roots are in heaven.

The young Rimbaud said that to prepare himself to write poetry, he would stare into a river until he could see a cathedral at the bottom. Sometimes this takes no time at all, because the world of living symbols is looking at you. This is what I found at the lake in my local park today.

photos (c) Robert Moss

The Rhymer

The Rhymer

I rhyme the days
I assemble what resembles
I am speaker for the Speaking Land
I am the grammarian of epiphany
I am the syn in synchronicity
I am the quick jay that ruffles your hair
I am the fox who puts edge in your mind

I am the code in the tree bark
I find a world in a grain of sand
I make futures in a tea cup
I am the fall of the cards
I am doctor for your poetic health

You are never quite ready for me
I give a tilt to your world
and you feel reality stutter
between what is and what may be
Look for me whenever life rhymes
When the world gets personal
feel me with you, alive and in-person.

- Mosswood Hollow, November 17, 2013

Let the universe tap you

"Don't ask what you already know," was the counsel of a babalawo, a high divination priest of Ifa, the Yoruba oracle. I think he was correct. We annoy the spirits, and confuse our own ways, by constantly asking questions when the answers are already with us.

    I have many friends who start the day by putting questions to some personal system of divination, from Tarot to tea leaves.  And many more who put a question to their dreams every night.
    I am in favor of seeking guidance from sources beyond the ordinary mind. But I have mixed feelings about asking all these questions, especially if the questions are on the same theme.

    There are questions that have to be lived, not merely answered. And it is often better to hear the questions the world is putting to us, rather than constantly putting our personal questions to the world.
    Spontaneous night dreams and the play of synchronicity in everyday

life will tell us what we need to know, if we are ready to hear. By attending to dreams, especially dreams we did not ask for and may or may not want, and  to the voices of the Speaking Land (as Aborigines call it) we escape the trap of constantly moving among projections of our wishes and fears. Spontaneous night dreams and synchronicity speak with an objectivity the ordinary mind often lacks.
     We can tap to awaken the spirits, as the reader of Ifa does with his divination tapper. But it is more interesting to let the universe and the spirits tap us.

For some fun synchronicity games, including ways of allowing the universe to put its questions to you, please read The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination (New World Library).

Ifa divination tray

Voice of Lightning

I strike fast, but before I strike I probe for the best way through the air currents, sending down feeders you cannot see. I am drawn to oak trees, and to humans who have the quality of oak, hanging on to their foliage when other trees have shed theirs, standing tall, deep-rooted in earth, but always reaching for the sky. I fall in love, as humans and spirits do. The humans I love best will be stroked by my fire and can read my movements in energy fields. They will be challenged, as others are, to ground my power safely, because I sometimes forget that these soft animals are weak vessels that need to conduct my force instead of holding it to themselves.

Connect with me, and you take on my speed, my ability to focus energy – and the challenge of remaining grounded and of passing on my gifts.