Death is lonely in company

Death is lonely in company.
He is always the unwanted guest.
The party stops when he comes in.
Bubbles go flat, petals drop from the flowers,
pink leaves the cheeks under any amount of Rouge.
People don't see his good side.
They see the skull without the skin.
They see teeth and tusks and sickles.
They taste metal and smell decay.
So he dresses up to meet awful expectations.
Death needs a friend who can see beyond the masks.
I think his friend is the shaman.

- Robert Moss

Photo: Autochrome of Tibetan skeleton dancer taken by Joseph F. Rock in 1925. A Buddhist monk is performing the Durdak Garcham, “Dance of the Lords of the Cemetery”. 

Where Past Lives Are Selected for Recall

I am in a village of terraced houses, in the British Isles a few centuries ago. I have come here to investigate my possible past life connections with a friend. This may be one of a number of excursions I have made overnight, to different landscapes in different times.

    I leave my friend in the village and walk a path towards the woods beyond the fields. The woods are lovely, deep and dark and inviting. But at the edge of the wildwood, something is moving. It is a black snake, slithering across the path, from right to left, at a diagonal. This snake is huge. When its head reaches the other side of the path, it straightens the body to move parallel to the path. I can now see at least twenty feet of its body, and more is coming.
   I hesitate. Though I don’t think this snake is venomous, I’m not sure I want to get any closer. I am ready to turn back, when I see the head of a silver wolf among the shadows of the forest. The wolf is staring intently at me. I recognize a friend, and know it is safe, and maybe essential, to go forward.
   I step over the snake, as if it is merely a garden hose.
   At the instant I do this, I am transported to another level.
   The scene changes completely. I am now in some kind of vessel, like a spaceship or orbiting observation platform. Two men are working the control panels, under huge windows. One remains at his work. The other stands up quickly, to see who has entered their space. He is clearly very surprised to find me here, but also friendly and welcoming.
    I know, before words are exchanged, that this vessel is a “relay station” and that the work of its controllers is to supervise and help to select the past life memories that become accessible to people living on the Earth plane. I understand, in this moment, that it is very important that past life memories are meted out carefully, so that we are not overwhelmed by a rush of information and emotion that could bind or distract us in our present lives.

I woke from this dream excited and full of active curiosity. Silver Wolf is a name I gave to a native shaman who can appear as man or wolf. He once gave me indelible instruction on the nature of various aspects of the soul and what happens to them after death. Black snakes have sometimes featured in my dreams as important boundary markers, between different worlds as well as different states of consciousness. To gain entry to an earlier time and fulfill an assignment in Celtic lands that once seemed urgently important to me, I once had to move beyond a seething mass of black snakes.

                                                        

If you want to know about reincarnation, start by studying how you can rebirth yourself within your present life, and then how you deal with what you were before.
    If you think you are connected to personalities in other times – that you have past lives and future lives – then consider the possibility that it is all going on now and that you can reach to those other possible selves, mind to mind, for mutual benefit.
    Don’t trap yourself in any story, from this life or any other, that binds and confines you. In this moment of Now, you are free to claim a bigger and braver story.
    Try to read the whole pattern from the perspective of your Greater Self, at the hub of all your personalities. 
    You stand at the center of all times. Use that knowledge. 

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

 

 

 

In the Voice of the Songbird

I am Marcella, called the Songbird because of my voice and because I can make men’s bodies sing. I can write my story in my own hand, because my father paid for a tutor. He was a merchant who sailed to the Bosphorus and the Black Sea.
     Bruno brings me figs and young green olives of Lucca, the best of the new harvest. The cloth of gold that trims my dress belonged to my mother. The mad monk of Florence tried to kill her for wearing it, under his sumptuary laws. Witch, they called her, as they call me, though none dares to raise a hand against me so long as I have the favor of the bishop. I confess that I sewed the mouth of a toad shut to punish a calumniator for speaking against me and to silence his abuses, and that I melted a wax imago of Cosimo’s organ after he raped me.
     I will never marry, but I know men and they know me. There is no one in the city as practiced in the arts of love, though there are acts I will not perform, not even for the bishop.
    Bruno will guard my body with his life, and he is as strong as a bear. But I know I will not be allowed the fullness of my years. I have no wish to survive the withering of my body, still firm and juicy as a maiden’s after forty summers.
    I will heed the wishes of my sisters of the Hive. We are about in all the countries of Christendom and in many that have never heard of Christ or accepted his message.

~

I wrote these lines after leading a group journey to real place in the Imaginal Realm, a Chamber of Mirrors where you can look into the lives of personalities in other times who are part of your multidimensional family. Participants in the workshop were asked to write an autobiographical statement in the voice of a personality of another time. The voice that wanted to speak through me was that of Marcella. Her reference to her mother's persecution by a "mad monk" (evidently Savonarola, a Dominican who ruled Florence and staged the notorious Bonfire of the Vanities before he was excommunicated and executed in 1498) suggests she lived in 16th century Italy. I am glad to know her, because in most of my impressions of past lives closely associated with my own, I have found myself linked to men, typically men of power.
     Where are the women? I have often asked myself. Oh, there is that woman of the future; I feel her even now, as I write. She is a priestess and a scientist, working to restore our world, seven generations into the future. Dreaming is central to her practice and that of her Order, and I am driven by a sense of obligation to her, the obligation - through my work as a dream teacher - to help make her possible.
    Perhaps Marcella and I will now be able to share gifts. In psychological terms, such episodes may mean that I am getting more deeply in touch with my female side, and I would be happy with that. Except that the encounter also feels transpersonal. Jane Robert's Seth insists that "the entire reincarnational framework must involve both sexual experiences. Abilities cannot be developed by following a one-sex line. There must be experiences in motherhood and fatherhood." Perhaps I am making a little progress.
     Marcella hints at an Order of women content to call themselves a Hive. I have encountered this language, and similar women, in other times and other lands, "in all the countries of Christendom and in many that have never heard of Christ or accepted his message", just as Marcella says.

Illustration: Portrait of Beatrice d'Este by Bartolemeo Veneto (1510) Public Domain

Where Dream Worlds Are Lifeworlds and Anthropologists Break the Glass

 In his book Ways of Knowing, Canadian anthropologist Jean-Guy Goulet reports from the dream world of the Dene Tha of northern Alberta. Here it is understood that "the mind resides transiently in 'someone’s body' kezi, and permanently in 'someone’s spirit or soul', key-uné." Goulet tells us that Dene Tha conceive of dreaming, sickness and death as so many journeys of the soul. "Dreaming involves the soul’s journeying away from the body to explore areas in our land, to engage in a medicine fight with other powers, or momentarily to spend time in the other land in the company of dead relatives. At the end of each journey, when one wakes up, one remembers the events that took place beyond the confines of the body. …Sickness may be induced by a prolonged absence of the soul from the body, in which case Dene Tha healers can be called on to retrieve the soul, bring it back to the body, and restore health. Death is the definitive separation of the mortal body and the enduring immortal soul." [1] 
    Goulet is a leading practitioner and advocate of what my extraordinary friend the late Barbara Tedlock called "participatory observation", in which the ethnologist does not hesitate to dream with the people they are studying, to practice their rituals, meet their spirits and share dreams both ways. In a pathbreaking essay, Barbara wrote that there has been a major shift in cultural anthropological methodology away from interviewing indigenous dreamers to gather reports for statistical content analysis. “Instead, anthropologists today are relying more on participant observation, in which they interact within natural communicative contexts of dream sharing, representation, and interpretation. In such contexts the introduction of an anthropologist's own recent dreams is quite natural, even expected.” [2] Barbara and her husband Dennis entered the dream worlds of the Quiche Maya and the Zuni in this way. [3]
    As a young ethnologist, Goulet chose the Guajiro [4] of northern Colombia as the people he wished to study. At the start of his fieldwork, he asked to be permitted to stay in a village where the people spoke only Guajiro so he could learn the language by total immersion. The question from the elders came back: Does he know how to dream? They accepted him when assured that he did. He then found himself immersed not only in a different language, but in a different way of dreaming. Each morning, he joined an extended family of fourteen people in the kitchen area to share coffee and dreams. The sharing began when an adult asked “Jamüsü pülapüin,?” “How were your dreams?”  Family members then took turns to recount their dreams. The grandmother was usually the one to comment. [5]
    Goulet had only a limited understanding of what was being shared until he started dreaming in similar ways. He could now grasp that for the Guajiro, as for most if not all indigenous peoples, the dream world is a real world, a lifeworld no less real than ordinary reality and sometimes more so. Things that happen in the dream world are real experiences, not symbolic "contents:" for analysis. Goulet tells us, "I began to share Guajiro-like dreams, dreams that contained elements of the Guajiro world."[6]
     When he lived with the Dene Tha, Goulet learned their ways of "knowing with the mind" communicating without speaking, seeing without ordinary eyes, traveling without moving. He knew he was in on a night when, troubled by the smoke of a fire ceremony in a native lodge, he watched his energy double get up and fan the fire the proper way with his hat.
     He makes a passionate case for participatory anthropology, supported by his first-hand experience. In anthropological fieldwork, Goulet tells us, “ it is possible, and even useful, for the ethnographer to experience this qualitatively different world of ghosts and spirits, and to incorporate such experiences in ethnographic accounts.”  [7] He calls to his fellow-ethnographers Go on, break the glass.
   “Anthropologists may do more than listen to what others say about their lives. Anthropologists may pay attention to their own lives, including their inner lives, and listen to other peoples' response to their accounts of their dreams and/or visions experienced while living among them” And then they can publish! “An interpretive synthesis of data pertaining to another society and culture may fruitfully include the anthropologist's accounts of his/her own dreams and visions as they inform his or her interaction with others in their lifeworld.” [8]
     This is the surely the remedy for the phenomenon observed in the South Pacific where it is still said that “when the anthropologists arrive, the spirits leave.” Alas, reports of participatory observation are still far from standard in the literature

 

References

1.      Jean-Guy A. Goulet, Ways of Knowing: Experience, Knowledge and Power among the Dene Tha. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, p.142

2.      Barbara Tedlock, “The New Anthropology of Dreaming”  Dreaming, Vol 1(2), Jun 1991, p.161

3.      Barbara Tedlock, “Zuni and Quiche dream sharing and interpreting”  in Tedlock (ed) Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1992 pp.105-131

4.  An indigenous people of the Guajira peninusla in northern Colombia and northwestern Venezuala. Today generally called the Wayuu. 

5. Jean-Guy A. Goulet, “Dreams and Visions in Indigenous Lifeworlds: An Experiential Approach” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, p. 177.   

6.   Ibid, p. 178 

7.      Ibid, p. 171.    

8.  Ibid, pp. 173-4. See also David E. Young & Jean-Guy Goulet (eds) Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Peterborough Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998. In their introduction the editors of Being Changed note that "experiences which may be extraordinary for Western-trained anthropologists may be commonplace for most traditional peoples around the world" - and, we might add, for active dreamers anywhere who have not fallen into the trap of reductionist thinking about dreaming and the mobility of soul. Goulet and Young go on to observe that "extraordinary experiences force one to deal with the possibility that reality is culturally constructed and that instead of one reality (or a finite set of culturally-defined realities), there are multiple realities — or at least multiple ways of experiencing the world."

 

Photo: Bistcho Lake, northern Alberta

Psychic sports in Tibet

 

What an amazing spiritual adventurer was Alexandra David-Néel, the Belgian-French "lady lama" who brought thrilling accounts of Magic and Mystery in Tibet to the West. I reopened that book and found myself with Naropa once again when he was interrupted by a dakini while engaged in black magic. She appeared in a corner of a magic diagram he had constructed to effect the psychic assassination of a rajah. The dakini, or khadoma ("she who moves through the air")  gave Naropa such a good scare that he changed his ways and endured years of hardship and humiliation in order to enter the service of the mahasiddhi Tilopa .
    Naropa was a Brahmin of Kashmir who was deeply offended by his rajah. He decided to kill the prince by black magic. He shut himself up in an isolated house and began what Tibetans call a dragpoi dubthab, a magical rite to cause death or injury. He was interrupted by a khadoma, a “mother fairy” who appeared at the corner of the magical diagram he had constructed. She asked if he was able to send the spirit of the rajah to a happy place in another world, or bring it back into the body and revive that body. Gambopa confessed he could do neither. 
    The khadoma cautioned him that in that case he would suffer profoundly in one of the purgatories. Terrified, Naropa asked how he could avoid this fate. The khadoma told him to seek out Tilopa and beg for initiation into the “Short Path” that frees a man from the consequence of his actions by the revelation of their true nature and can bring the attainment of buddhahood in one single life.
     So Naropa went to Bengal, where Tilopa lived. He was received with rudeness and practical jokes. Tilopa violated all rules, took many forms, and often Naropa failed to recognize him. When finally Tilopa allowed contact to be made – when Naropa found him lying like a corpse beside a funeral pyre – he taught Naropa nothing. He merely allowed him to trail along behind him and beg for food for his master. He was given disgusting assignments. He was told to drink raw sewage and had to endure torture, with wooden splints pushed under his fingernails.
    Enlightenment finally came when the master took off his shoe and whacked Naropa in the face with it. He saw the stars, and the meaning of the Short Path. [1]  

Before I read her books, I had thought of Mme. David-Néel as one of those eccentric Brits who went native in the days of the Raj. In fact, she was born in Belgium and the last part of her name (from her husband) has an acute accent on the first E, left off in most English editions.
     Her travelogue presents Lamaism (a better name than Tibetan Buddhism) as quite different from other forms of Buddhism because it became a theocracy and because of the emphasis on what she calls “psychic sports” and high and low magic. She describes the abuses by which a guru seeks to establish total authority over his apprentic. She describes gruesome rituals of necromancy in which the practitioner revives a corpse, wrestles with it and – if he wins the contest – bites off the dead man’s tongue, which becomes a powerful tool. (Its exact uses are not described). There is the practice of chod, or “severing” in which the performer gives his body to be torn apart by wild animals, demons and hungry ghosts in a ritual which – in the Tibetan mind – is not symbolic but literal.
    Despite the teachings that all realities are generated by mind, many things going on here, including the multitude of ghosts and demons who infest David-Néel's Tibet, do not appear (to almost anyone) to be merely thought-forms.
    Buddhism maintains that there is no individual soul or spirit that survives death, yet in Tibet religious practice seems at odds with this teaching. Famously, there  is the succession of tulkus, held to be reincarnations of high lamas (and others). After the death of a high lama, the search is on for his tulku. This normally gets under way two years after the death. He may have left clues. Seers are called in. An infant who may be the tulku will be tested; he has to identify which, in a selection of personal items, belonged to the deceased lama. The lama’s special drinking cup is the most important of these items.· 
     Then there is the practice of phowa which involves transferring the personality to another reality - or another body in this world. 

1. Alexandra David-Neel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet. (New York: Dover, 1971) pp. 170-8

  

When you feel you're a character in a novel someone else is writing

Do you ever have the feeling you are a character in a novel someone else is writing? The crazy-brilliant collector of anomalies, Charles Fort, offered the suggestion "that Momus is imagining us for the amusement of the gods, often with such success that some of us seem almost alive – like characters in something a novelist is writing; which often to considerable degree take their affairs away from the novelist." For those who have forgotten their Greek myths: Momus is the god of mockery and satire who was kicked out of Olympus because the other gods couldn't stand his savage humor. The quote is from Fort's The Book of the Damned. Its contents are less sinister, but possibly more weird, than the title suggests. By "damned", he was referring - with Momus-like mockery - to facts and ideas excluded from discussion by conventional thinking and mainstream science, like fish falling from the sky. The trick is, of course, to become authors - or at least co-authors - of our own life stories, and determine what genre we wish to inhabit. When I write fiction, I know that it is for real when a character comes alive and tries to run off with the story. In life, I sometimes feel like one of those runaway characters. Right now I am very curious to know who came up with the initial plot. In other words, I am a character in search of his author. There is a serious risk for a character who embarks on this quest. The author may have given up on you or forgotten your existence. Once contact is made, your author may decide you to write you out of his story and put Finis on your current life page. So my assignment grows. As a novelist, I create characters. As a character, I must play a larger game. I must seek to create, or at least re-create, my author.

Illustration: Momus as the tarot Fool in an eighteenth-century deck.

You are in the afterlife now

 

In this part of Manhattan, on a mild sunny day, you can imagine you are in a village, even seventy blocks north of Greenwich Village. I stop into an old-time two-fisted bar and order a martini, straight up, from an approving bartender. The couple who take the stools beside me are red from an island vacation, sporting sunglasses and bright prints. They ask for piña coladas.The bartender snarls, “We don’t serve none of them fruit drinks here.” This is precious, in an era when other establishments pretend that something made with chocolate can be called a martini. My drink is perfectly chilled. 
    I see across the Big Pond to a friend who is burning juniper in an old-time ritual on a hill above the Baltic Sea. The water gleams behind her, through pines and silver birches. An eagle owl soars overhead, searching. Her eyes are searching the juniper smoke. Can she see me in the shapes that form? Is she trying to call something through? 
     I toast her, and the Sisters, with the last of my gin. I give the bartender a $5 tip. I don’t know when I’ll see him again.
     I have an appointment on the other side of the island, at The Dead Poet. 
     I walk across the park. 
     On the corner next to The Dead Poet, a panhandler with black eyes, beaked like a crow, has come up with a creative line. He croaks at bypassers, “You are in the afterlife.” 
     A well-fed lady squeaks and hurries by. A man in a suit looks aghast. He pulls cash from his pocket and drops a large bill in the beggar’s cup.
      I lean against a mailbox, watching the pattern repeat. “You are in the Underworld,” the wild-eyed panhandler riffs on his theme. People either rush by, pretending not to hear, or they tremble and throw money at him, hoping to buy a Get Out of Jail Free card.
      It’s my time. They are waiting for me in The Dead Poet. 
      Crow Man is watching my feet when he caws, “You are in the afterlife.” 
      “Finally,” I say very clearly and distinctly. “It is a pleasure to meet a man who understands where he is.”
      Crow Man looks in my face and starts to tremble. He holds out his cup, but not for me to donate. He is offering me the payment for the Ferryman.

 

[from a 15 minute timed writng exercise]

Photos by RM

 

Writing while the blue sand runs

 

 

When I approach a major writing project, I sometimes notice I have decades and decades of journals and drafts and sketches that hold relevant material. They are alluring but perilous. I can get trapped and enmeshed in them, like a tomb raider in an Indiana Jones movie when the roof of the underground temple starts coming down. I need to find how to get out of my self-made literary necropolis and write fresh words.

I often fall back on a practice I lead in all my creative writing retreats: timed writing.  I have found it's incredibly productive to tell people to do something in a very short period of time. When I say a short time, I mean five or fifteen minutes. I find that fifteen minutes is a terrific space in which to get something down.

For my own writing practice at home, I have a marvelous assistant. It is a quarter hourglass. It runs for fifteen minutes. I found it online. It has blue sand in it. Blue is my favorite color. Whether I feel ready or not, if I have fifteen minutes, I will upend the hourglass and start writing. This is especially good to do when I do not feel ready, maybe utterly uninspired. I write anyway. And I stop when the sand runs out. 

My hope is that I pretty soon I’ll be writing consecutively in these swift sessions so I may have the whole draft of a book, or at least a chapter or essay, if I keep doing this for a few weeks. I know that if my fingers go fast enough, as the sand runs down, there’ll be no time for my inner editor and my inner critics to take command of my thoughts. Some days I have no clue about what I am doing or what I want ti to come of this. That’s okay.  I write for that quarter hour anyway and sometimes something wonderful or terrifying or both breaks through – a bigger story that has been stalking me, the soul of a book I had not planned, a trickster spirit who wants to remind me that play is always the thing. 

While the blue sand runs, I do not look at those notes and digital files and piles of books and folders. I keep my eyes on the page I am writing, on paper or screen. Let me say this as clearly as I can. I'm not looking at old drafts or sketches. I'm not looking at my journals full of treasures though they are. I'm just writing. I might be drawing from my memories of things that have happened in my life and things that I've written about in some form somewhere else, but I'm not looking at anything. . I'm not struggling with the old furnishings of the mind. I'm writing while the blue sand runs.

I often say that creativity requires us to play first, work later. If you have heard me say that, you may object, “What if you don't feel like doing it?” My response is: however you feel before you get into the swim, doing something for fifteen minutes is no big deal. Make it a game. Play at writing, at being a writer. For quarter of an hour, do what writers do.

Have you heard what William Faulkner said to the wannabee writers who flocked to Ole Miss for the first and last creative writing workshop he ever gave? He looked at the eager faces in the lecture room and said, , "So you want to be writers?”. When the cheers had died down, he said, “So write." And he left the room. 

[from a guidance session I gave at a writing retreat] 

For a sample of raw product from one of my personal 15-minute sessions see "You are in the afterlife now"

 

 

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. 

Celtic Metamorphoses

 

A horned god stands back to back with a second self. 
You pass the gatekeeper, into a field of metamorphoses. 
You turn into the curl of a wave, or a waterbird in flight. 
Fish becomes man, dog becomes dragon.
You reach for a flagon of unmixed wine
and the handle becomes the hound that chases the duck
that swims into your mouth on a red river. 

Long-beaked bird-men are alive on a Shetland cross.
Gold and silver and bronze glint at the throats
and on the forearms of queens and heroes.
Here everything is in connected, everything in flux,
vital energies change form and surge beyond form. 
A technology of enchantment captures minds
and binds them in tendrils, endlessly looping,
making knots without end, no strings you can pull. 

Are those the antlers of an ancient elk, bigger than moose.
on the head of that statue from a warrior grave?
You put them on and look with his sight over fertile land,
proud of your kin and ready to fight for them.
You reach under his leaf-shaped shield.
and turn the unseen handle that gathers the force
to send out your spirit double on its excursions.

The boar is everywhere, before you and around you. 
Be careful. You pause to hear the hot howl of war
from the throat of a boar-headed carnyx.
Swords and shields, iron and oak, ash and bronze.
Shields that are plain at the front but have hidden powers
at the back and in the coiling serpents at the grip.
Shields with glaring eyes and hidden faces of raging bulls.    

You find your end at last, in the cauldron from the bog,
under the fierce stare of gods you cannot name.
You swim in bull's blood, down to the scene of passion
where a naked woman warrior exults, sword in hand,
over the dying bull whose potency will pass,
with the rush of his blood, to one who is called this way.

- Robert Moss

Where a Dog Is the Soul's Best Vehicle

I have always known that dogs are marvelous soul friends and can play a psychopomp role for those traveling beyond death. In my contunuing reserach into conceptions of soul among indigenous people, I came upon a note by a Catholic missionary suggesting that among the Inuit a dog could be not only a soul companion but a soul vehicle for the deceased.

Father Roger Buliard reported from his time among the Copper Inuit (called Eskimos in his day) that they took great care to propitiate the anernek - translated as "breath", soul or spirit - of the animals they hunted so that the caribou, for example, would remain friendly. They were no less solicitous in dealing with the anernek of dead Inuit.

"When a relative dies," Father Buliard reported, the Inuit "give his name quickly to a dog, so that the spirit will have a place to rest until a child is born to inherit it. The anernek is a fleeting thing, easily lost, and every artifice must be brought to bear to prevent its prowling and causing trouble.”

Other interesting revelations in this note (1) the breath soul is closely associated with the name; (2) the clear belief in metempsychosis, that at least one of the multiple souls of a human can occupy successive bodies.

Source: Roger Buliard, Inuk. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951. pp.264-65.

Illustration: "Esquimaux Dogs" by John James Audubon in The Quadrupeds of North America (1845-1848). Public domain.