Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Into Manannan's Realm


I sing of a voyage, and a voyager, sails furled in the dusk, yet ready to spread before a favoring wind.
   The black goose sails before, into the fire below the sunset rim of the world. The way leads to the sunken lands, and to the earth beneath the sea that land-bound men will never touch.
Watch how the waters turn and swirl, opening a tunnel between the elements. Let yourself flow through the passage.
You are entering the realm of Manannan mac Lir, most unknowable of the Old Ones, one who escapes definite and conventional forms. Your kinsman. You are at home here. You breathe where others drown. Sea-born, sea-girt, salt blood in your veins, coral sprouts from your marrow. You surge with the horses of the sea, into a rare kingdom

Away, away come away my love
To fields of coral and pearl
Away, away come to me my love
To she who one was your girl

                                               
I heard the siren song, though I had long since turned my back on the sea and lived in a tamed country, in a gentle valley.
   She found me there, as surely as a kelpie finds a lone fisherman in a curragh on a lonely night with the whisky in him, or the fire of the stars.
   Something out of memory. But whose?
   The memory of the cell? A current in the blood? Something held in the mirror of dreams without bodily substance, yet alive in the silvered deep of the glass, in suspension between the middle world and the worlds that escape form?
Do all such visitations come from the past, from those beneath the earth or sea? Or do they come from the same time, but a parallel realm of being? Why not from the future?
Questions, questions, while her lilting song echoes in my inner ear.

Away, away, come away my love.

                                                        ~
Put this down. Etch it on stone, mark it for memory:

There is one time, one art that encompasses all. Look through the hole in the stone. The Holy Man knows. See through his single eye the oneness of things. All created things, all that is past, or present, or to come, will and can be seen in this glass without a lens.


Note of Origins

These words came streaming through me on a night when I was writing some reflections on how more is available in dreaming than is understood by the daily trivial mind. I wrote these lines: 

Dreams are the doorway between the worlds. In modern Western society, we have a diminished understanding of the word “dream”, reflected in the common expression, “it’s only a dream”. Let us push deeper, beneath the surface clutter of day residue and “inferior thinking” and the smorgasbord of broken memories, to what Sri Aurobindo calls “the sleep of experiences".

I paused from writing these notes, because I felt a deep shift in the atmosphere, blowing like the wind off an unseen sea. I felt the power of a deeper source, moving with me and through me as wind and waves. I adjusted my inner senses and let braver words come, both fresh and ancient.


Photo: Bow Fiddle Rock near Portknockie on the north-eastern coast of Scotland. The natural quarttzite arch is thought to resemble the tip of a fiddle bow. 

7 comments:

  1. You have painted a beautiful canvas here Robert. When I read there is one art, I felt;"and it is Love". I feel to dream with all the chambers of my heart, I am required to be in a practice of one time. Thank you for this writing.

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  2. Beautiful Robert, thank you. I read Conscious Dreaming some years ago and found it so inspiring.

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  3. Oh yea this is great. Has a hypnotic shapeshifting feel for me when i read it. Gave me an idea for a screenplay i could write. The thing about my ideas they always have juice in the beginning but then i lose it when i start to expand on it. Perhaps not enough material to make it substantial. But ill try working differently on this one. Perhaps through dreams and synchronicity in life. Thanks robert! Youre the man!

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  4. Thanks so much, Mary. I haven't been entirely idle in the twenty years since I published "Conscious Dreaming". You may be interested in some of the other books briefly introduced here (they include a collection of my poetry and Tales from the Imaginal Realm): http://mossdreams.blogspot.com/2015/08/for-dream-reader.html

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  5. Thanks, Eugene. I can assure you that you are not alone in finding the middle stretch the hardest in a writing project.

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  6. This is beautiful, Robert. 💙

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  7. Beautiful Robert, thank you. I read Conscious Dreaming some years ago and found it so inspiring.
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