Bookish clues to creative life

In Manhattan, I enter a rare bookshop. It’s an unusual step; I know such places are likely to be blindingly expensive. On a large table, I see a book devoted to Yeats. It seems to be a handsome version of a scrapbook or album, with many pictures and excerpts, including sections of manuscript, on each of the heavy stock, creamy pages. I doubt that it has new content, but I’m attracted by its beauty. I look at the penciled price. $610. Too rich for my blood.
    A store assistant leans over and says, “It was last sold for $210.” I’m surprised he would confess to the huge markup. Then he says, “I could let you have it for $150.”
    “Really!”
    “We get large consignments, usually from estates, and we have to keep the stock moving. Otherwise we have to let books go, and they just revert to paper.”
     I agree that I’ll buy the Yeats album for $150. I notice that there seems to be a second copy underneath.
    “Hold it for me for now.”
    “Are you looking for something else?”
    “Aubrey de Sélincourt.” I name the writer without hesitation.
    The store assistant makes a quick search and returns with a book with a yellow dust jacket without illustrations. It looks like an old scholarly edition. I glance at the list of contents. Each part of the book has a title involving a Greek word; part 3 or 4 is titled KTISIS, or KTHISIAS. The work seems rather rarefied, philosophy or theology. I’m not sure it’s what I want.
     I explain to the store assistant that I am interested in de Sélincourt as a writer who managed to enter the heart of the Ottoman empire, at its foundation.

Feelings: I woke from this dream this morning curious, intrigued

Reality check: I was in Manhattan yesterday. I know rare bookshops of this type in the city, and usually give them a wide berth. I love Yeats, and write in depth about our relationship in The Dreamer's Book of the Dead and The Boy Who Died and Came Back. I would probably buy a Yeats album like that, at the reduced price.
     I know Aubrey de Sélincourt as the translator of Herodotus, whose Histories describe the sweep of peoples across Anatolia, later the heartland of the Ottoman empire. I see that de Sélincourt wrote two dozen books. The son of the owner of the Swan & Edgar department store, he was an Oxford classics scholar, an athlete and yachtsman. He was an officer at Gallipoli, later a pilot for the Royal Air Force, shot down by the crack German aviator Voss and held as a POW for the last part of World War I.
    A little research suggests that ktisis means creation in the sense of founding from nothing, from Homer to the New Testament.
    I have read a little about Ottoman dreams, and have taught Active Dreaming in Turkey.
    As for books that "revert to paper" unless acquired - ah, well, I think of all my unfinished or abandoned drafts of books and stories from several decades, including a novella involving Yeats.

My intention last night was for insight into defining my present creative life purpose…

Action: Look again at de Sélincourt’s translation of Herodotus, and at his book The World of Herodotus. Venture in to one of those rare bookshops in Manhattan on a future visit. Accept the assignment of life creation. Stick my head back inside the dream, if I can, and bring back more of the book with the difficult Greek terms.

Bumper sticker: My creative purpose involves books of rare quality.

From the dentist's chair to a pink sand beach

"How are you today?" asks the dental assistant.
    "Fine," I respond. "Except that I'm on my way to a dentist's chair. Anyone who tells you only that they're fine on the way to an appointment with a drill is giving you less than a full response."
    I am going to see a new dentist, for the first stage of replacing a crown. I've been alerted that this will be a marathon session, at least 90 minutes. I adjust my body to the seat, taking in the decor of the room. Models in my line of sight demonstrate the progression of periodontal disease. The walls are empty, stark white, except for medicine cabinets. Nothing to inspire cheerful thoughts or stir the imagination, except maybe through sensory deprivation.
    The new dentist arrives. He announces, "First, I'm going to numb you up."
    "No you're not," I correct him. "I don't need anesthetics of any kind for this." I explain that over decades I have undergone multiple root canals, crown replacements and even oral surgery to extract the shards of a shattered tooth without numbing.
    "How do you do that?"
    "I let my mind carry me to another place."
    He's willing to trust me. He just says that if things get too much I should raise my left hand.
    The drilling begins, and goes on and on.
     I'm only distantly aware of it, because I am on a pink sand beach, enjoying the hard spray coming off the breakers. I run back and forth into the sea. Then I slip along the coast to bathe at leisure in the warm waters of a protected cove, worthy of a boyhood story of pirates, or a romantic tryst with a mermaid.
     I am distracted from this pleasant idyll only when dust from the drilling, or water from the jets being squirted intermittently into my mouth, threaten to go down my throat.
     Ninety minutes was a good estimate. It takes all of that for the whole procedure.
     The dentist asks me to say more about how I can get through this stuff without being numbed.
    "While you were working on my teeth," I tell him, "I was on a pink sand beach in Bermuda."
     He says, "When I was in dental school they told us that we can teach patients to put their mind somewhere else, by telling them to feel sand between the toes, stuff like that. I guess I'll have to remember that when you come in, I'll need to make that pink sand."
     "It's okay. I'm already there." I add, "I'd just like you to put some good pictures on the walls - of beaches, or lakes in the woods - so people who need outside stimuli can start taking themselves into those scenes, instead of the progress of gum disease."

Cashew juju

Here's a tiny tale of synchronicity from today.
    Late last night I watched the film version of Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimananda Ngosi Adichie's marvelous and moving novel of the ordeals of a family and a people in the Biafran war. I had a book-lover's unease as I fired up my DVD player. Could the movie be even half as good as the novel? Actually, the film is first-rate, but I missed some pivotal scenes and character exploration, and some of the actors looked nothing like the characters who came alive in my mind as I journeyed in the world of the book.
    I was prompted to start reading Purple Hibiscus, Adichie's previous novel. In chapter one, I followed a deepening family drama, told in the voice of an Igbo girl. It led to the Sunday lunch table where her father, a businessman who owns a bottling company, is planning to bring a new beverage to market: cashew juice.
    His wife tells him, "They brought the cashew juice this afternoon. It tastes good. I'm sure it will sell."

    The father instructs the help, "Bring two bottles of the drink they brought from the factory."
    For a couple of pages, we follow what could be a taste test for cashew juice except that no one really knows what to say because the primary taste in their mouths is the ashes and vinegar of a family quarrel. "Just like white wine," says Mama, but in fact cashew juice tastes nothing like wine. The son, Jaja, in trouble for failing to go to church that day, says nothing at all. Kambili, the teen narrator, thinks it tastes like water and looks like urine, but doesn't dare to say these things.
     I stopped reading after this scene, though eager for more, because it was quite late and I had errands to run in the morning.
     In mid-morning, while waiting for my cats to complete their check-up at the vet, I glanced over the New York Times headlines online. Nothing good from Iraq or Gaza or Ukraine. Then I scrolled down to this headline: 

Cashew Juice, the Apple of Pepsi's Eye

With rising fascination, I reviewed a long report by Stephanie Strom on how Pepsi is contemplating a huge marketing and distribution campaign, under the Tropicana brand, to make cashew juice a beverage of choice across India and then bring it into Western markets as a premium drink. "Pepsi is betting that the tangy, sweet juice from cashew apples can be the next coconut water or açaí juice."    Cashew juice is produced from cashew "apples" - the red or yellow fruits that are usually thrown away after the nuts are removed. So, the basic ingredient could hardly be cheaper, though there is the slight problem of milking and treating the juice before it ferments, which it does very fast. You can't have alcohol in a Tropicana bottle.
    What are the odds on reading a chapter in a 2003 novel about taste testing cashew juice as a new item in the Nigeria of the 1960s - and then reading a few hours later that a major corporation, right now, is mounting a campaign to make cashew juice a world drink?
    Nothing big is going on here, in terms of a personal message. It's not one of those cases of meaningful coincidence when you feel the world has shaken your hand or slapped you in the face. This nutty little story just brings the sweet and poetic sense that everything is connected and that, truly, life rhymes.

Anacardium occidentale from Koehler's Medicinal-Plants (1887)

You don't give a haircut to a lion

I spent the whole night, while my body slept, helping people to find and shape stories. With some, this meant helping them to find their voice, to speak in front of others, free of text, and to release their stories from the clutter of biography and explanation. First the adventure, later the discussion. With others, it meant getting the right words to line up together on a page. So many pages! Some beautiful creamy art paper, others veined like parchment, some ruled in composition books, others quite unruly.
    Some of the stories came from dreams. Some grew from the slightest wisp, the merest snippet from the night. Some were necklace stories, strung like bright beads on a string of incidents from the speaking land: the caw of that crow, the fall of that card, the vanity plate that read Camelot. Some were the work of literary privateers, given permission to steal a little from others. Some were inspired by shelf elves who arranged for a certain book to turn up or vanish at a creative moment.
   The unstoppable stories were the ones that had been seeking the teller for years, even a whole lifetime. I helped people shape these wild ones too, but only a little. You don’t give a haircut to a lion.

When I left my bed to walk my dog in the morning sunlight, I felt deeply satisfied, with the kind of satisfaction that comes when you have done a job that you chose to do as well as you can. Helping people find their best stories, and tell them so well that others want to hear them, is one of my greatest pleasures. And one of the greatest gifts of the Active Dreaming methods I have created is that we are forever encouraging each other to become both storytellers and story makers.

Lion Man on brown bag (c) Robert Moss

"He can't kill both of us, can he?"

Listening for the first kledon of the day is one of my favorite synchronicity games. The word "kledon" is Greek. It refers to the first sounds you hear coming from silence, maybe a snatch of conversation, or the cry of a bird, or the sigh of wind in the trees.
    Monitoring kledons was a favorite form of divination in the ancient world. At Pharai in the Peloponnese there was a marketplace oracle that delivered messages through sounds received in this way. If you were seeking guidance, you approached the statue of Hermes, the divine messenger, in the center of the walled market. You whispered your request for counsel in the rough-hewn ear of the god. Then you clapped your hands over your ears, shutting out the noise of the market, until you reached the outer gate. There you took your hands away from your ears, ready to receive the first sounds that came to you as the response of the divine messenger, "the friendliest of gods to men".
    In everyday life, the stir and bustle of a gritty city street may deliver a kledon as effectively as preceding silence, when a message becomes audible through undifferentiated white noise.
    I received a kledon this morning that is very much on my mind. It was not simply something overheard in the street. It was addressed to me, and inspired by my little dog Oskar.
   Oskar is a miniature Schnauzer who weighs all of 22 pounds. He has hosts of admirers. It is not unusual for him to draw three cries like "What a cutie!" in a single block. Today, he drew a different kind of remark.
    Walking Oskar towards the park around breakfast time, I had a question on my mind. I was debating with myself whether I can really manage to take on two big new projects this fall. They will both demand considerable time, energy and focus, and it is possible that they could prove to be mutually competing.
    I was not resolved to put my question to the world in the sense of asking for direct guidance. But I had the theme on my mind when a stranger got out of his car a few houses up the street from my home, He hoisted a huge carton of stuff out of his vehicle, raising it to shoulder height. As he approached me, he pointed his chin at my dog and said, "He can't kill us both at the same time, can he?"
    Could this odd, unsolicited little joke be a comment on my theme - the matter of whether I can handle both of those projects? If so, what is the guidance? "Can't kill both" could mean that I can't "execute" - in the sense of accomplish, bring to fruition - both projects. The remark could also mean that two are stronger than one. Then again, as a friend pointed out, the message may be that the dog (and his master) can't focus on more than one target at a time.
     Oracles are known to be ambiguous. That's how they stay in business long-term.
     But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that my friend's suggestion was wise. The dog has to focus on one person at a time. I need to focus on one project at this time. And I know which one that is.
    So: a couple of hours after the doggy encounter, I talk on the phone to the manager of the second project. He's disappointed when I tell him that I don't think I can go ahead with our plan this fall. Then I tell him the dog story. As soon as I quote the stranger who said, "He can't kill both of us at the same time," the manager roars with laughter and shouts, "I get it!" We are able to agree to defer our fall project for later discussion and a possible date next year.
    The doggy kledon not only gave me the guidance I needed to make a decision. It gave me an entertaining and effective way to communicate that decision, making what could have been a difficult conversation into a very cordial one.
     

Note: For a full account of the market oracle at Pharai, please see my book Conscious Dreaming.

photo (c) Robert Moss

"Don't run over my breakfast again"

I know that crows and ravens have a rich vocabulary. "Crows communicate their motivations, identities and report on local conditions each time they caw or croak," report John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell in their excellent book In the Company of Crows and Ravens. "But sounds made by crows are much more than simple signals that we occasionally intercept. Together they encode a complex language, steeped in cultural tradition."
    Alas, like most humans I am often tone-deaf to what the crows are saying, noting little more than the difference between a caw and a trill, or between a long caw and a short one, and the multiple cries of assembly and dispersal.
    This morning, I could not fail to notice the long, harsh caws of a lone crow perched in a linden tree across the street as I walked my dog back from the park. The crow sounded assertive, maybe territorial, but I did not know what he was saying until I started crossing the street. There, flattened next to the dotted yellow line, was a small gray-brown squirrel, freshly killed.
    Sometimes messages are simple. The crow was saying, "Don't anyone dare to run over my breakfast again."

Drawing (c) Robert Moss

Choose the day

Carpe diem, goes the old Latin tag. “Seize the day.”  The sole commandment of conscious living is no less proactive, but more conscious: choose the day.
    What we encounter on any day has a great deal to do with what we bring to that day. We draw or repel different events and encounters according to our attitudes and the basic energy we are carrying. We find doors open or closed according to our willingness or refusal to change our expectations and our plans as circumstances change.
     We choose every day, whether we are aware of this or not. If we tell ourselves we have no choice, that is a choice we are making. If we tell ourselves that we have no choice because a situation is beyond our control, we forget that we can still choose our response to the world, and that can change everything.
    Truth, in our lives, is what we remember and act upon. Lists of rules or intentions can become like grocery lists; we are forever in danger of forgetting items or getting what matters mixed up.
   So my list of personal commandments reduces to this: Choose the day. The content of that choice is less important than the consciousness that we have a choice and need to approach life, on any day, as choosers, not spectators, victims, or consumers. 

Text adapted from Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Sunflower photos (c) Robert Moss