Monday, February 22, 2021

The Other, Again



I
t has happened again. When this first occurred, I resolved not to write about it or think about it, for fear of losing my mind. Now it has happened again, on January 20, 2010, I know I must write myself through it. I shall write it as a story others may read in the hope that with time I, too, will be able to read and remember it only as a story.
     There was still a rheum of dirty snow about the leafless trees in the park, and ice on the paths, but I found it mild enough to sit on a bench near the lake house and contemplate the frozen pond. My little dog lay at my feet. For a few moments, the city around me was still, with an air of anticipation, like someone holding his breath. I had seen no one in the park, and was mildly irritated when a man sat down on the other end of the bench. My dog wagged his stub, but he is loose with strangers. I glanced at the newcomer out of the corner of my eye. He was very young, with long dark hair falling over his shoulders from under an absurdly romantic beret. No doubt one of the transient college kids who come and go in my neighborhood, or one of the hungry artists who hang their pictures for a week at a time in the transient basement galleries.
    He made an awkward ritual out of stuffing and lighting a cherrywood pipe. The heavy fruited scent of his tobacco carried me back across time, to an awkward young man I had once known well.
     I turned to him and asked if he was smoking Amphora tobacco.
    Without meeting my eyes, he agreed that he was.
     I inspected him more closely, the wide shoulders and narrow body, the silk scarf at his throat, the maroon-colored journal book, big as a child's tombstone, in his hand.
    "Then I know who you are." I told him. "You are Robert Moss, though you sign your articles and poems R.J. Moss in The Canberra Times and the student paper."
     He returned my inspection. "I know you from somewhere. Are you one of Dad's brothers?"
     "I am Robert Moss. I am you. I've just lived a lot longer."
     "You're crazy."
     "What year do you think it is?"
     "It's 1965, of course."
     "You are mistaken. Today is Wednesday, January 20, 2010."
     "Don't come the raw prawn with me! It's bloody 1965."
     I was tickled by the way that, when rattled, he became a bit more of an Aussie than was his natural style. "Then you are living in Bruce Hall on the campus of the Australian National University. In your bookcase you have Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal and Dante's Inferno in Italian - but not the rest of the Commedia, because you have not yet found the comedy in life - and the Penguin editions of Dostoyevsky, Faulkner and Homer. You also have a blue-bound copy of Kautilya's Arthashastra, which fascinates and repels you because it teaches that the law of life is 'big fish eat little fish.'"
     R.J.Moss was not impressed. "Of course you know what books I have in my room. I'm dreaming, and you're a part of me that for some reason is appearing as an old man with white hair who's been eating rather well. So you know what I know."
    "Did you know that the man who loaned you the Arthashastra will become your father-in-law?"
     As he stared at me, I added, "You haven't met his daughter yet, but you will, when she comes out from England. She'll get a job in a bookshop, your natural hunting ground. On the day you first speak to her she'll be helping a customer who wants to purchase a map of the world that does not include the United States."
     "You are one of my thought forms, and you will disappear if I tell you to."
     "You got that from one of your books on magic, probably Dion Fortune. Try it if you like. It won't do you any good."
     "You claim I am going to marry my professor's daughter."
    "Yes, but it won't last. You will marry much too young, with too much of life ahead of you to stay in a nest. Anyway, for a while you'll be seized with a reckless desire to fight battles. You'll get over it, but not until you've been blooded. Then you'll marry again. You'll notice the woman who will become your second wife when she tells you she can dream the result of a horse race."
     "This is definitely a dream."
     "Where do you think you are now?"
     "I'm sitting at the edge of the lake in Canberra, and it's bloody hot. That silly water jet doesn't make things any better."
     He made the motion of fanning his face. I recalled that in that absurdly oversized book he lugged everywhere with him, he had drawn a picture of Nietzsche at the edge of madness, and written an interminable series of poems for a girl, now lost, he called Lady of Khorasan, even though she had bad teeth and had never been outside New South Wales, except to study in the dreary capital, set down in the bush at an airless remove from the ocean beaches that are the country's lungs.
     At this age, he lived for poetry, I remembered. Perhaps I could move him with a line he had not yet encountered, more than with a preview of his future that, while factual, seemed to him full of impossibilities.
     "I will say something you do not know but whose reality you will accept because it is poetic truth. Are you willing to hear?"
     He nodded.
     "Il faut vivre comme un ours."
     He frowned a little. "'One has to live like a bear?' Is that right?"
     My turn to nod.
     "Who said that?"
     "Flaubert."
     "Not possible."
     "You haven't read enough Flaubert to know. And you have yet to write a novel. You will write novels, and will publish many. More important, you will meet the Bear and this will change everything." My tone indicated that we were no longer talking about any bear, but the Bear. "You won't understand until he comes for you, and that will be in North America, when you are twice your present age."
     "This is the strangest dream. I don't believe I'll remember any of it. But just in case, if you have lived my life ahead of me, what can you tell me that can help me?"
     I considered telling him: you'll break hearts and your heart will be broken in turn, but you must never stop living from the heart. There is one who watches over us and never leaves us. Swim whenever you can. Listen to your dreams and move always in the direction of your dreams. Beware of a woman with razors in her eyes, and a sheriff in the Blue Ridge Mountains who makes moonshine in his bathtub. Never lose your sense of humor, once you find it again. Don't reverse your steps once you have crossed the Pont Neuf. Define yourself, as many times as necessary, to escape being defined by others.
     What I said was, "Twenty-three years from now, you will be booked on an early plane to Philadelphia, with the intention of driving to a certain house in coal miners' country, in Lancaster County. You must not take that plane."
     "What's in Lancaster County?"
     "Trust me on this. Will you remember?"
     He shrugged. I knew he would forget, but an hour before he was due to leave for the airport, twenty years into his future, more than twenty years into my past, a dream would remind him. I knew this because - but for that dream - I would not be alive today and we could not be sitting on this bench together.
     He surprised me by saying, "I have something for you: Ich bin ein Funke nur vom heilengen Feuer."
     I remembered now that I - that is, he - had taken some German in order to read Rilke in the original. My German did not stick; I can barely manage to order sausages in a beer cellar.
     "Rilke?"
     His mouth curved into a faintly superior smile. "It seems I know things that you do not." His mood flickered like a shadow on the ice. "This is the strangest dream. I know I'll forget it. If not, you would have known we would meet this morning."
     I thought of a fantasy by Coleridge. A man dreams he is in paradise, and he is given a flower as proof. When he wakes, he has the flower in his hand.
     "Let's give each other something," I proposed. I dug in my pockets, and came up with a wad of crumpled bills. I separated the least disreputable and handed it to him. He examined the face of the wigged man inside the oval, and lingered over the occultists' pyramid on the back with the eye in its floating apex. I drew his attention to the small text next to the signature of the Secretary of the Treasury: "SERIES 2006".
     He groped in his own pockets in turn, and produced a gum-nut.
     "Look at the time," he jumped up. "I must be going."
     As he rose, my little dog jumped up too, wagging his stub.
     "There's one thing more," I said. "Dogs love you no matter what."
     "I know."
     We did not shake hands or have body contact in any way. We walked away from each other in opposite directions. I did not look back; I cannot say whether he did.


Postscript: One day after this encounter, I cannot find the gum-nut I put in the breast pocket of my shirt, which I threw in the laundry hamper at the end of the day and only searched this morning. When I walked my dog today, I made a point of not returning to the bench by the lake.
     But something is still in play because I noticed that the big maroon journal - his journal, from 1965 - has surfaced in the room I use as my archive. It was clearly visible near the top of a stack of notebooks in an open documents box. Of course I had to pull it out. I treated it as I do any book, opening it at random to see what comes up.
     The book of R.J.Moss fell open at pages numbered 114 and 115 in his hand. The bottom half of page 115 was filled by his drawing of Nietzsche staring into the pit of madness. The upper half of page 114 contains his copy of a word-picture of Stefan George by Andre Gide, in French. Below this, in script running diagonally across the page, giving the general impression of a wing, R.J.Moss inscribed several verses of Stefan George including the line

Ich bin ein Funke nur vom heiligen Feuer

with the translation

I am a spark of the holy fire.


THE OTHER BORGES


Jorge Luis Borges' story"The Other" came to me twice, in mysterious ways, over the holiday season. Just before Christmas, I woke with the certain knowledge that there was something by Borges that I had not read that I needed to find that day. I have many editions of Borges on my shelves (I've been reading him since 1970) but I went to my nearby magic bookshop at opening time to see if anything popped up. There, atop a pile of new arrivals, was a translation of Borges' late collection The Book of Sand.      
    The opening story is "The Other", in which Borges, seated on a bench beside the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1969, encounters a young man who proves to be his own younger self, who thinks he is sitting by the lake in Geneva in 1919 and is reluctant to believe this this encounter can be other than a dream. Borges gets the attention - and wins the partial belief - of his younger self by reciting an amazing line of Victor Hugo that the young man has not yet discovered, about the "hydra-universe" twisting its "scales of stars."
    The following weekend, ranging around in the early hours in the midst of leading a workshop, I opened a 500-page edition of Borges' Collected Fictions, in Andrew Hurley's excellent translation, as a random act of bibliomancy, and found myself at the first page of "The Other", again.
     Like Borges, I am intrigued by the possibility - for me, a certainty - that we can meet our past and future selves. In homage to the great Argentine writer, I have borrowed the outline of his story, just as he borrowed the ideas and the form of a story by Kurd Lasswitz (which he reviewed in an essay titled "The Total Library") to craft his celebrated "Library of Babel".



Text adapted from "The Other, Again" in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions.

RM Journal drawing at top: "Writing on the Wall (or Hanging Stanzas)" from a dream of February 22,2021 I associate with Borges


32 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lovely.

Thank you for posting this.

Thank you for all your dream work, in fact. So much of what i've been learning from you has been helping me to regain the vision/understanding of existence that I had as a child and was forced to abandon through the process of what this society calls "education".

I first was introduced to Borges by a cousin when I was in my early teens. i've been feeling the need of late to reread his works, and have tried - in spanish. still too difficult! i shall have to give in and reread the english.

Thanks for setting such a lovely tone for the day, robert.

ginta

Carol said...

Okay, I am riveted by this encounter and tap into the encounter as absolutely real. As the first pages of a novel, it would pull me in also. Wisdom and suspense, what could be better.

Worldbridger said...

Very evocative and beautifully written - but who is the meta dreamer who stands watching the two on the bench?

Patricia said...

Robert
Crazy? I don't think so.
My first impulse was to send you a gumnut. Plenty about here where I live. Finding your old journal was better than finding the gumnut. I am encouraged to open some of my old dream journals to find some wisdom for today.
Next I remembered a movie called 'The Kid'. Bruce Willis meets his younger self and his older self.
Thank you for sharing this.
Patricia from Oz

Rebecca said...

Robert the Poet-glad he is still around! I love how this account embraces “The Other” in its unique way, still touching on the subject of parallel lives. It was quite touching to read this interaction. The tone, language and spirit with their obvious differences through the years. The admonitions seemed like things a loving father would say. How did you feel when you walked away from your younger self? I will surely keep working on my journal. I hope to read more of your wonderful experiences and stories!

Diana said...

Such a beautiful piece of writing, poignant, true feeling and totally absorbing. Hope you carry the story on...of all things happening at once, within a personal frame.

Savannah said...

Beautiful Robert... By way of synchronicity I was reading "Borges and I" from that same Hurley edition last night. Now having read your piece I am struck by the lines "stone wishes eternally to be stone, and tiger, to be tiger". Perhaps the poet wishes eternally to be poet. Lovely encouter of spirit from which I imagine both walked away changed, thank you!

Unknown said...

January 20, 2010 = 0120 2010

Alla said...

This is strange... Early in the morning today, in the twilight state, I decided to call my older self for to ask about something. I heard the voice and felt almost like "your younger self". Same emotions, same skepticism. :-)))) Well, the future will show what's what.
Thank you, Robert!

Robin O’Neal said...

Wow. Sigh. I am deeply moved. The writing is exquisite. The story riveting. The truths undeniably profound. Still, I can't quite put a finger on what it is that's "stirring" (perfect word, not mine) in me reading this.... it runs deep and gratitude and mystery are pieces...
There's something about the year 1965?
This is a lesson, I know. I'm just not sure where it belongs... still, very grateful.
Thank you, Robert.

Robert Moss said...

Carol & Diana - I'll respond to both of you first, to settle something with myself. Your comments are lovely, but when Carol suggests that this might be the opening of a novel and Diana invites me to carry the story forward, you are inviting me to go precisely where I have decided NOT to go with this jeu d'esprit. The pleasure in this particular writing, for me, is that it is complete unto itself in a small span and does not need to be seen as part of something larger in bulk. Borges was the master of the miniature, and I've been seeking to learn from him. He always wanted to write novels, but the closest he came was a longish short story (often called a novella) titled "The Congress", which is not one of my favorites among his fictions. I have written novels - as I tell young R.J. Moss - and may do so again, but for now I'm focused on shorter forms.

Robert Moss said...

I'm grateful for all the warm and generous feedback. While writing is most often a solitary enterprise, one of its great pleasures is being able to share with creative friends who support the endeavor as we go along. My favorite way to do this is to read aloud to one or more people who are close to me at the end of the day, perhaps by an open fite. Sharing at this blog sometimes provides almost equal sustenance and delight.

Among all the other things going on at this blog, I am using it to share experiments with new modes of writing, some of which escape existing genre categories and roam the borderlands between what would be shelved as "fiction" or "nonfiction".

Carol said...

Is there not a song from ( our) era? Go where you want to go? Do what you need to do? Writing is solitary, but it is good to stay connected and to share. I send my poems to my best friend with Alzheimer's, and occassionally put a few things on the dream forum.

Robert Moss said...

I like Worldbridger's question, Who is the meta-dreamer. On this occasion, it's easily answered. It is the writer.

EARTHDREAMS said...

Dear Robert,
In my dream of yours Robert, this dreaming encounter entices the writer, artist in us to pay attention to the 'senses of life'! the sent of amphora tobacco smoke, the image of a young fellow in a romantic beret. Allowing the writer to catch a thread here and flow with the dreaming onto page. (the experiment of new modes of writing as was mentioned).
I realize that these memory dream scapes bring pieces which fill in the blanks of who I may be now. I see the shaping and and able to produce a whole new story of me then and me now. Facinating!
Swim with this Robert! There is healing here and teaching for us all. Interestingly the 'Year 1965' adds up to '21' the "World Trump' in tarot ...
In my dream the poet in me is reminding me; "I am a spark of the Holy Fire".
Very inspiring to all the creative talent out there. Thank you!
Love, Karen

Sara said...

I'm incredibly moved by this posting of the selves meeting.It has me thinking about the times in the past when I reached back to assist my younger self during times of great need.Your posting reminds me that when this occurs it is time folding back on itself in a very literal way.

Robert Moss said...

Sara, I do believe we can play counselor and mentor to our younger selves, and we have made this a conscious journeying practice in my advanced programs. In turn, we can receive gifts of memory and soul energy from our younger selves. Let's remember that an older and hopefully wiser self may be looking in on our current situation right now, with advice to give. And that beyond the games of time a larger self may be watching from a place outside time, at the hub of our many selves.

Leanne said...

What strikes me the most on reading this post is the lack of response or words I can offer back. There are, I believe, some experiences, dreams or moments that define definition and analysis and just need to sink into the marrow of my bones and settle in with my cells as a living reminder of the sheer possibility of consciousness and our abilities to journey beyond what we may believe. This is one for me. Thank you. I found most comforting your sharing of the need to express and release as I struggle with that need currently as well. I am so often in awe Robert of the depth and breadth of your experiences that somehow that small vulnerability speaks volumes. Leanne,

Robert Moss said...

Rebecca - Thanks for welcoming the poet in me in this time, as well as the other. Sometimes he gets some space on this blog,

I want to respond briefly to your question about how it feels when one leaves an encounter with the younger self. "The Other, Again" is a story which, like its Borgesian model, does not have definite consequences, leaving a feeling of wistfulness and perhaps an edge of what the Portuguese call saudade. I have had other encounters of this kind that I believe have had very definite consequences and produced much stronger feelings, including relief, gratitude, and satisfaction that has even bordered on a sense of triumph. Like my encounter with the younger self who visited the island of Kos (wher I hope to travel again in May) - the birthplace of Hippocrates and the site of a great temple of dream healing - in the early 1970s. Caught up in family dramas and the business of the world, he missed the numinous Asklepian experience on the island at that time, and found only the ruins and the consolations of ouzo. When I met him again, as the 1995 Robert, I sought to help him to get through the fog, meet the sacred healer, and see the sun at midnight. I believe that what was transacted between us changed the lives of both Roberts in the Now-time of each. My feelings, on leaving that younger self, were of gratitude and awe.

Wanda Burch said...

Thank you for this lovely and mysterious encounter.

I am intrigued by your self assignments in writing small pieces with inspired themes. I am reminded of so many of my favorite stories that could shape or re-shape dreams, experiences, and stories from my own life. I think of hundreds of pages of notes from my visit to West Africa and how I could write a "finding my treasure in my own back-yard" story from those experiences. I think of what could be written from the mysterious experience of horses on the lawn at Johnson Hall that led to a ghost story that had spun out of a death on a train track that I was near witness to.

Your beautiful evocation of a dialogue with "The Other" also reminds me of a dream dialogue I shared in 1990. In my dream I strolled alongside a fence casually chatting with "her," my other self who took the opposite side of whatever opinion I was voicing as I rationalized how I was to proceed with a serious health diagnosis. I alternately listened to and ignored "her" but ultimately had to acknowledge that she was raising some good points. I should try to write from dialogues with myself.

Robert Moss said...

Wanda - You have material here for any number of wonderful stories. I, too, am intrigued by the theme of the "treasure in the backyard" - a treasure that is at home all along but can only be found after a journey to a far place alerts the traveler to where it is. And there are so many variations on the endlessly intriguing theme of the Double, or the Other, and room for many more versions. I love to read your story of the other self on (or on the other side of) that fence.

Robert Moss said...

Alla - I'm intrigued by your account of the mentoring you invited from a possible older self. After journaling for all these years, I am actually able to track the possible interventions of an older self (sometimes younger than I now am) at various points in my personal odyssey. This was extremely helpful when I was very young, deathly ill and lonely, and found encouragement and support for the journey from an avuncular white-haired man who would turn up and assure me that - despite everything - I would survive, and know the love of women, and that the day would come when "the whole world" would want to hear the dreams it was so hard to talk about in the society in which I grew up in that era.

Patricia said...

Robert,
This blog has had a huge effect on me. I didn't read the 'story' as just a story. I read it as being a real encounter and I do think that it encourages us to really know that these things are possible. So, flying on this understanding I began to wonder which of my younger selves could do with a visit from me. It didn't take long to surface.
Cleaning up my office I came across two photos that were taken on my wedding day. Now I have no way to explain how they got out of the album. But they did. One was the cutting of the cake and the other was leaving for the honeymoon.
After my sitting with them today and the drumming, a story of my own is forming. I have to discover again, the wishes she made, cutting the cake. And I have to prepare her for the journey.
I looked closely at the photo in the going away dress and I noticed that I was clutching a small purse. I do associate my identity with my handbag. Then, I turned the photo over, the photographer who took the photo worked for a company called "Identity". The message is clear, I did have to hold fast to who I was so that I could be who I am today. At times it was a struggle, but that is another story.
Love and light
Patricia from Oz

Robert Moss said...

I love how the shelf elf - or in this case the album imp - came into play here, Patricia. And how the word "Identity" stamped on the back of the photo of the bride in her going away dress clarifies what is to be nurtured and protected when the older self reaches back to the younger self as mentor.

Do remember that few things are as important as story. We live by stories. If we don't know what story we are living, we are probably trapped inside the wrong story, an old one that doesn't fit us any more, or one made for us by others so they can keep us in one place, without growth or transformation. I loved writing "The Other, Again" as a story within which, perhaps, many can find a mirror and a sense of larger possibility. Within the literay constraints I adopted, I am drawing on MANY experiences of encountering younger and older selves across time, and of guiding others to do this. No doubt I'll be publishing more on this theme, here and in more permanent formats.

Patricia said...

Thank you Robert,
Iam encouraged by your response to continue on this path.
Being trapped in the wrong story. I believe this and most of my work centres around this theme. Thus the workshop I have developed using movies to illustrate the power of the Archetypes and how we can befriend and maybe even dance with them to change the story. It helps to challenge the opposites within and to withstand the paradox they present.
Looking forward to more of your insights and challenges.
Patricia from Oz
ps. It's been bloody hot over here.

Sara Firman (Sulis) said...

Hello Robert - I am about to start reading one of your books, the first I have read.

What strikes me already, in this post, is your storytelling skills inspired by dreamwork.

I have often turned dreams into poems and wondered about the possibility of stories also.

I am thinking it would be another way to do dream re-entry and to bring in waking synchronicities.

Last year I had my first clear dream of the future I think. Here is an extract:

"I look at the documents I have been given to work on. They seem to be slightly faded photocopies and notice that they are 'mine'.

In the pile is a paper that already carries my editing marks, an article by me, and a letter written to me that is talking about astrology and carries little drawings of planets and symbols.

I express my confusion to Joe [my partner who is an astrologer] and say that the letter is something that 'must have been written to me in the future' as I have no recollection of it."

Thank you for your availability through your writing here. Joe and I are hoping to join one of your workshops this year.

Robert Moss said...

Hi Sara - Dreams sometimes present us with fully-shaped stories or scripts, other times with just that teensy bit of grit that can grow the pearl. Carrying a dream forward through further acts to a satisfying denouement can facilitate healing as well as fresh creation.

I often learn from a dream self who sems to have gone ahead of me, scouting the roads I may take into the future for challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Sometimes my dream self has written and published things I haven't even thpught of in my waking mind, so that playing catchup with him becomes a fascinating exercise.

I'll look forward to welcoming you and Joe into one of my playshops. I don't know how far you are ready to jump, but my five-day retreat on "Writing as a Ste of Conscious Dreaming" at a lovely private retreat center near Seatle in February will be a great place to created and to dream.

Epona said...

I was taking French in the Army and had come home after class for a nap. I woke from the nap with an image and a sort of poem or vignette all in French fully formed from my dreams. It is the only piece of writing that came complete (and in French to boot) from my dreamscape.

"Reviens a moi" elle crie a la foret silencieux. Son crie, en poingard, entaille la paix du crepiscule, tandis que son amant se detourne de t'elle. Dans sa memoire encore est encore est encore.

(It has been so long since then, I have forgotten if I spelled everything correctly and I wasn't sure if the blog could take the accents.)

The translation:

"come back to me" she cries out to the silent forest. Her cry, a dagger pierces the peace of the twilight while her lover turns away from her in her memory again and again and again.

This came with the image of a woman in a forest clearing on her knees crying with her hands over her face. It was very moving to me and I wrote it all down immediately. I can still feel her pain to this day.

Robert Moss said...

Very poignant, Epona. Reading it I feel the kiss of the poniard (an olde English version of the French "poignard"). Have you thought of using this as the opening of a story and inventing the rest?

Many of us dream in languages we know imperfectly and sometimes in languages we don't know at all (although in the latter case it can be really hard to hold on to much). My French, in waking life, is rusty and highly imperfect, but like you I have dreamed - and been able to record - some quite lengthy passages, including poems, in French that are beyond my ordinary language skills.

One of the gifts of dreaming is that it helps us become MORE, and puts us in touch with the "moreness" of everything.

PS> Unfortunately, it seems that this blog - at least in the Comments box - doesn't accommodate accents. I'll see if we can do something about that.

Jane Carleton said...

Beautiful Robert. I feel this rich encounter in a timeless place. It feels like I can step right in.

I thought today of my most tragic times, and of how I had the uncanny ability to see beyond my youthful experiences and into wisdom. I remember a knowing I had at sixteen that was far beyond the immaturity of my years, and of the voice that reminded me of truths that would color my perceptions, and save me, throughout my life. It may well be the mysterious source of my protective inner voice is my own older, wiser, helpful self.

Robert Moss said...

Thanks, JaneE. I do believe that we have the ability to reach across time to provide the support and counsel and encouragement our younger self may desperately need in a time of vulnerability, pain or confusion. And that this can change everything.

Raymond's Work said...

Hello Robert,

Thank you for linking to this story of meeting Your Other Self.

I can't say that I have met my other self, younger or older, but I have had 3 or 4 lives before meeting you in Duvall in February. (I, too, continually am forced by my own soul is my best explanation, to define myself anew.)

Although I had other plans, my soul called me, likewise your soul called, too, and I am forever happy they did.

I used the words "sheer ecstasy", a word I use very judiciously, in my journal to describe my experience of my first extended conscious dreaming perhaps 6 weeks ago. Soon thereafter I read someone's describing the ecstasy of dreaming.

Equally, I experience a satisfying creative energy and expression when I write, though mostly for my journal. My gaining the courage through Stephanie, Lynn, and Elaine who went before me, to read my "Confession to Earth" and receive critical feedback produced a plate tectonic shift in my Being that has given me a more flowing voice. I continue on.

Thank you for sharing this and all the beautiful stories of your soul.

Raymond