Dreaming with the People of Amber

The first time I visited the Baltic, I dreamed of an ancient priestess who showed me the spiritual uses of amber. She brought me inside a chamber like the inside of an egg-shaped amber, glowing with golden light, and showed me how to use a smaller version of this amber as a place to see. She gave me words in Old Lithuanian that Lithuanians in my workshop at Nida, on the spit of land in the Baltic Sea called Nieringa, were able to translate with some difficulty.

On my second visit to Lithuania, I dreamed again of the People of Amber. Here is the report I wrote in my journal at the tme:

October 6. 2009. Suvalkija district, Lithuania

I am out in the woods, in the rural part of western Lithuania where I am staying. I come to some wide, shallow steps, just packed earth with wood at the edges. I notice two snakeskins, tied in knots that resemble figures of 8, then a larger one, tied in a slightly more complex knot, on a higher step, and know these were left as signs and also that the snakes were not venomous.
    Now I see vivid, brightly colored scenes of ancient battles - of Teutonic Knights who invaded these lands, and Lithuanian Grand Dukes with their knights and men at arms, struggling against great odds to force them back. This living history unfolds into times where local people took to the forests and the mud to carry on their resistance against invaders. I see people who lived with wolves and bears and tried to call on their energies in the fight. I see huge mystery beasts in the woods that look like elephants and wonder whether these are the shades of extinct prehistoric creatures, or entities created by the country''s defenders in an effort to equalize a conflict through psychic means of attack.
    I wander deeper into the woods. I am conscious that sticky mud is everywhere, and getting deeper, just as I found it roaming fields and ancient hill forts the previous day. I come to the house of a ragana - a witch - on one of the sloppy forest trails. It is just a hut among the roots of a crooked tree. I see the face of the witch before she scuttles away into hiding. She has painted the upper part of her face, from the hairline to the cheekbones, chalk-white so it looks like part of a death's head, or perhaps a venomous spider. While she avoids me, nasty slithering things rise from the mud.
    I'm willing to fight her allies, if need be, and am glad to see that an enormous Bear is with me, as a bodyguard. Yet I'm thinking that the witch is merely defending herself; I have wandered into her territory, and she has reason to fear intruders. Instead of starting a fight, I call down Light, and a bright shaft of amber light immediately descends.
    I am happily surprised to find that it serves as a tractor beam. It pulls me straight up into the air, far above the mud and the dark woods. I find myself inside what seems to be an egg-shaped amber, with female presences who remind me of ancient priestesses of this land I have met in previous dreams and journeys.
    The leader tells me, "You must understand that there are the Mud People and the Amber People, and here you belong to the People of Amber. Your duty - and that of those you train here - is to build bridges and wooden pathways so people can get across the mud safely. You must avoid allowing yourself to be sucked down into the mud. You must remember to call on the power of Light Amber to heal and to guide, and on the power of Dark Amber to remove the darkness."

I titled this dream "The Mud People and the Amber People". 

As I surfaced from this mostly lucid dream, the moon shone bright in my face for a moment, like a spotlight. Then a cloud blew above the apple trees and mountain ash outside my window, and I lay back in the gentle dark, savoring my latest encounter with the "understory" of the Baltic lands where I was traveling.
    I was staying at the country place of a "good witch" in the Suvalkija distrct in Lithuania. After attending my workshop in Vilnius, she invited me here to learn practices of healing and divination handed down in her family from mother to daughter and never written down (until I took notes, with her permission). She had burned amber in a ritual the evening before my dream. In the morning, after hearing the dream, she continued my instruction. She demonstrated how to move light amber over the body in a spiraling motion to heal. Then she showed me how she uses a dark amber (also called "vampire amber" here when used in this way) in a different pattern to extract disease and "strangers" in the body.
     Over a breakfast of dark, nutty "grandmother's bread", homemade cheese and butter and coffee chewy with grounds, we talked about the significant of "Mud People" in the literal history of Lithuania, whose name means "Rain Country". Lithuania has no real natural borders. Its main defense against invaders and occupiers, across the centuries, has been the mud. When the cities fell to enemies, people "went into the mud".

My dreams of the People of Amber offer light in more than one landscape. I have invited groups near and far to enter that amber space of sanctuary and healing.One of those groiups met with me in a forest of dark green pines and silver birches at Kurzeme on the Bay of Riga in neighboring Latvia . Fueld by shamanic drumming, we journeyed tigether therough the dark woods of histiry and personal struggle into the amber light.In Riga, I found the egg-shaped amber in the photo. It fitted my palm, and my dream.

I recount furher adventures in Lithuania, including an encounter with a Merlin of the Baltic and dream archaeology at a working site in Kernave, in The Boy Who Died and Came Back. 

Orenda and the practice of giving thanks

In the indigenous North American way, giving thanks is a practice for every day, not just for an annual holiday. Here is a little of what I learned after I was called in dreams by an ancient woman of power to study the traditions of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois.

Orenda is the power that is in everything and beyond everything. It clusters in certain things – in that tree, in that stone, in that person or gathering – and if you are sensitive you will feel its weight and its force.
    People come from another world – in the Iroquoian cosmogony, they call it Earth-in-the-Sky – and the origin and purpose for life here below is to be found in that Sky World. Tosa sasa ni’konren, they say. “Do not let your mind fall” from the memory of that other world where everything is directed and created by the power of thought, and everything lives in the glow of a great Tree of Light.

    The first person on Earth who was anything like a human came from that Sky World, after she fell – or was pushed – through a hole among the roots of its great tree. As she fell, she was caught on the wings of great blue herons, who carried her gently down to a chaos of water. Animals, diving into the black deep, found earth for her, so she could begin to make a world. Turtle offered its great back and First Woman danced a new world into being. Under her feet, a handful of soil became all the lands we live on.

    The memory of Earth-in-the-Sky in no way blurs the knowledge that orenda – which is power, spirit, energy, consciousness all at once – is in everything. In the way of the Onkwehonwe, the Real People (as the Iroquois call themselves) we must remember that our relations with our environment are entirely personal, and require appropriate manners.
    If you want to take something from the Earth, you must ask permission. The hunter asks the spirit of the deer for permission to take its life and wastes nothing from its body. I once watched a Mohawk medicine man gathering healing plants. He started by identifying the elder among a stand of the plants and speaking to this one, seeking permission. He offered a little pinch of native tobacco in return for the stalks he gathered for medicine.

    In this tradition, the best form of prayer is to give thanks for the gifts of life. In the long version of the Iroquois thanksgiving, you thank everything that supports your life, and as you do this you announce that you are talking to family.

I give thanks to my brothers the Thunderers
I give thanks to Grandmother Moon and to Elder Brother Sun

In the Native American way, as Black Elk, the Lakota holy man, said, “the center of the world is wherever you are.” For him, that was Harney Peak. For you, it is wherever you are living or traveling. You may find a special place in your everyday world. It may be just a corner of the garden, or a bench under a tree in the park, or that lake where you walk the dog. The more you go there, and open both your inner and outer senses, the more you will find that orenda has gathered there for you.
     A woman who lives near the shore told me that she starts her day like this: “I go to the ocean in the morning at sunrise and put a hand in the water and say Good morning, thank you, I love you. I feel a response from this. The tide will suddenly surge up a little higher, hugging my feet, which is kind of cold in winter but wonderful in warmer weather. I talk to everything out loud like this.”
     The simple gesture of placing your hand in the sea, or on a tree, or on the earth, and expressing love and gratitude and recognition of the animate world around us is everyday church (as is dreamwork), good for us, and good for all our relations
    It is good to do something every day, in any landscape, to affirm life in all that is around us. This may be especially important on days when the world seems drab and flat and even the eyes of other people in the street look like windows in which the blinds have been drawn down. The Longhouse People (Iroquois) reminded me that the best kind of prayer is to give thanks to all our relations, to everything that supports life, and in doing so to give our support to them. When I lived on a rural property, I began each day by greeting the ancient oak on the dirt road behind the house as the elder of that land.
    These days, it is often enough for me to say to sun and sky, whether on the sidewalk or in the park or among the streaming leaves of Grandmother Willow

I give thanks for the morning
I give thanks for the day
I give thanks for the gifts
    and the challenges of this lifetime

Photo of Grandmother Willow by RM

For more on indigenous tradition, please read my book Dreamways of the Iroquois. For more on everyday practice, please see my book Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life.

Tea Rose Gate

 

There’s a garden among the stars

where flowers are gates to other worlds.

Try the pink rosebud that opens shyly.

plunge through its smooth and fragrant folds

into the Victorian garden where tea is laid

and sweet girls play and show a blushing priest

a bunnyhole that leads to Wonderland

and a ginger cat issues opaque directions.

Take the dare of the “Drink Me” bottle

and you’ll become inconceivably small

even faster than Alice, so fast you won’t see

a grass blade rear into a royal palm

and ants turn into six-legged horses.

You’ll grow, by diminishing, into a world

vaster than the one you knew before,

you’ll swim among stars no telescope has seen,

you’ll find light-ships among the galaxies,

immensity held in the iota of a speck

that eludes the electron microscope

but not the home-drawn voyager.

This poem is in the collection Here Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Exclesior Editions, State University of New York Press. 

Island of dreams

 

The island opens and veils itself
each wave brings clues and treasures
a button or a bassinet
a shift for a selkie
a love letter in a champagne bottle
a speaker phone in a conch shell
a mermaid who is dormant, not dead
undeniable evidence of Atlantis

But they are gone with the next wave
hard to catch even when
we haunt the hot sands
or leap from the lava cliffs.

Often we are called the other way
through the forest of tigers
to the Mountain of Thirty Birds
where the mists are flirty
and swallow direction and distance
as we hunt for the memory palace
and the lover we left in the Moon Café.
The island opens and veils itself again.

- Robert Moss

Words of Counsel from an African Divination Priest

 

Many years ago, I received some counsel from a babalawo, a high divination priest of Ifa, from the Yoruba tradition. He offered three insights on how we should approach oracles (including our dreams) and life possibilities that have stayed with me, indelibly. I will offer them here as things all of us may want to consider in posing questions about our life issues. They may help to enlarge our understanding of the issues themselves.

ONE
Don't ask what you already know!

TWO
There are two things in your life it is difficult to change: your basic character and your maximum allotment of time and energy in this world. Everything else is open to negotiation.

THREE 
You must find out who defends you before the greater powers.

I can hear questions flocking. Apply these insights and find your own way.

The Door to the Dream Vault

 

Often it feels like the door to a bank vault, that door between night dreams and the daylight world. You've been into a deep place, full of valuable things you'd like to bring back with you. But as you leave the treasure house, a door swings shut behind you. Maybe you try to catch the door before it closes, but it's so heavy and its movement so strong that you frequently find you can't manage that.
    When the door is sealed tight behind you, you may look for a way to reopen it. But the combination is tricky, and there may be a time release, as with the doors to some vaults. that won't open until a certain hour or date unless you can find a supervisor or an override mechanism.
     Many people just shrug and go about the business of the day, leaving the door between the worlds shut. Some people dedicate themselves to keeping it shut, because they don't make room in their lives for dreams or because something once happened on the other side that scared them. But even the most passionate and dedicated dreamers go through periods when the vault door slams shut, morning after morning, leaving the strange feeling that we are missing out on something really important.
     I have recorded many thousands of my own dreams over the years, sometimes a dozen from one night. Because I know just how much goes on in the dream worlds, I get edgy when I find I have lost my night dreams. Yes, I make a practice of living as if everything around me is a set of dream symbols. And I have developed many techniques for entering states of conscious dreaming, including the use of shamanic drumming. But I treasure the gifts of spontaneous night dreams, especially the ones we don't ask for and may or may not want, because they hold up a magic mirror to our lives and show us things with an objectivity we can rarely achieve in ego-centered consciousness. They may also be adventures across time and in other dimensions of reality. 
    Dreaming is social as well as individual. We get out and about and meet others: other dreamers, the deceased, beings other-than-human. Sometimes I feel that behind the door of the bank vault is a lively, well-appointed restaurant, as in the photo from a converted bank in Butte, Montana.
     Let's assume you know all about setting an intention for the night. (My favorite one is "Show me what I need to see.") And that you have trained yourself to be ready to catch and record dreams at whatever hour you stir from them. But now you are finding that, despite your best efforts, that heavy metal door keeps swinging shut behind you, keeping the treasure (and the beauty or terror or both) down in the vault. What to do?
     See if there is a wisp that followed you as the door was closing, or slipped through the tiniest crack before it was sealed airtight. In ancient Mesopotamia, dreams were called "zephyrs" because, like little breezes, they can slip through a chink in the ordinary world. Stand under the shower, or sit with a cup of tea, and see whether the wisp will reveal itself in the rush of the water or the rising steam. If you can grab that wisp, it can take you back behind the sealed door, in its own special way.
     If you can't catch even a wisp, be alert for how the logic of the dreams you missed may now be playing out in the world around you. Find signs and symbols as the day unfolds, and read them as if they were dreams. 
     As general practice, we want to learn how to slow down the closing of that tremendous door, by schooling ourselves to linger in the twilight zone between sleep and waking. Instead of jumping out of bed when you wake, however you wake, see if you can stay for a time between the worlds, in the twilight state that researchers call the hypnopompic or hypnagogic zone. A great place to develop the practice of conscious or lucid dreaming.
    You might try this, when you wake up and find your dreams are missing. Picture yourself standing in the doorway between the worlds. It is open, like the door of the bank vault in the photograph. One one side is your dormant body in the bed. On the other is an adjacent world, a world from which your traveling self is returning. You can look both ways. If you are crafty, you may be able to tiptoe back into the vault and grab something you can bring back to the daylight side. It could be pure gold. Or the deed to a magic kingdom.

Ankh at the heart

I am asked to find a symbol for the heart.

    It comes immediately. It is a standing ankh, silver-bright. Waters stream over and around it. I know that its gift is neverending life.
     I remember drinking healing waters from a vessel shaped like an ankh, and holding such a vessel to the lips of those in need of strength or healing.
     I remember an ancient baptism: an ibis-headed god of the Moon and of writing pours the waters of life over the chosen initiate.

     How often have I seen the ankh in the hands of deities, grasping it by the loop, giving meaning to the name the Romans gave it: crux ansata, the handled cross, the cross you can handle.
     The essence of male and female are wound together in its form. Here are the knot of Isis and the djed pillar of Osiris, the womb and the phallus or backbone of the bull.
     I remember other uses for this eternal symbol of life. Of looking through the loop, as through a viewfinder, into the world-behind-the-world.
     Gratefully, I say the old, old words.

I am life
I am love
I am truth

     From life to life, from world to world, there are forms that return.

Note: Egyptologists contiue to speculate whether the form of the ankh was chosen because of its resemblance to a certain phsyucal object. There was popular theory that ut might be modeled on a sandal strap. ings'. The ankh symbol has also been identified wth a girdle knot, a mirror, a double-axe, a penis sheath, and the thoracic vertebra of a bull. The rival comparisons are discussed in Andrew Gordon and Calvin. Schwabe, The Quick and the Dead: Biomedical Theory in Ancient Egypt (Leiden:Brill, 2004) pp.102-4.