One of the games I like to play with my journal is to open an old one to the same month and day in a previous year and see what was going on then and whether life is rhyming today.It seems an appropriate pastime at anniversaries, and as the year turns. I went back in my journals to the beginning of 2015 just now. Here is how I recorded the start of an ordinary day at home back then. Nothing big going on. There was the dream, though..
In my dream, I am in London in the
time of the Blitz. I returned from this excursion feeling excited and moved and
deeply stirred. My dream took me into the life of a Royal Air
Force pilot in a time of danger and love and romance. He loved women, and women
loved him. One of the women he adored was a wartime nurse. They did not get to
spend much time together. They were with each other in my dream.
It seemed I was in his body, in his
situation, sharing his moments of passion and his fierce willingness to put his
life on the line for what he believed in. As I slowly came back from this dream
adventure, I felt his presence, as if for a moment both of us were in bed in my time. I was grateful for this deep and renewed connection with someone I believe to be
a member of my soul family in another time, and outside time. .
When I was satisfied I was holding the essence
of my dream of the pilot, I got out of bed, showered, threw on clothes. I had
one swallow of coffee – literally, because my little dog was waiting for his
walk. Dogs walk you no matter what. So very soon I was out on the street with
my dog, heading for the park.
I was now taking the second step in
my daily practice. The first step is to hold the essence of the dream, not
necessarily all the details, but the essence. I had that. Out on the street, I
was walking my dream as well as my dog. I was not puzzling over the dream, and
certainly not trying to analyze it. The dream was simply in my mind, and
perhaps in my energy field. I was open to the world showing me something that
might reflect the dream, as the dream cast its reflection on the world.
As I walked the dream, I was ready
to do another daily practice, which is to pay attention to three things that
enter my field of perception, through any or all of my senses. These three
things do not have to be extraordinary, weird or even surprising. They may be
things you might never notice at all, let alone look at twice, unless you were
playing this kind of game. A license plate might catch your eye, because it is
a novelty plate or has a combination of letters and numbers that intrigues you.
You attention might be drawn by the cry of a bird, or the words of a stranger
talking on his cell phone or doing karaoke with his headphones. Maybe something
dropped on the sidewalk or left on the curb for trash collection will catch
your eye. Maybe you’ll smell cooking, or diesel fumes, or a perfume that takes
you back to Paris in the spring of a certain year.
Paying attention to things like this, on
any street on any day, is a way of consulting sidewalk oracles. When the takeaway
is a set of mostly visual images I think of this as playing Sidewalk Tarot. Whatever
pops up might be a card from a divination deck. It might be your card of the
day, or part of a three-card spread, or a larger spread.
That morning, while the dog sniffed
a hydrant, I noticed a license plate I had never seen on my street before. The
plate was distinguished by the red letters RN. It belonged to a registered nurse.
Nothing unusual here, but those letters RN were very special to me, because I was walking with the bittersweet memories of a wartime romance with a nurse. I had the soft, cozy sense of confirmation. I felt that an unseen hand
had patted me on the shoulder.
I walked on with my dog into the big park.
We took the longest path, around the lake. I paused to admire the beautiful
weeping willow across water and thin ice. She was green last week. Now winter
had yellowed and thinned her gorgeous hair.
When I returned to my house, I grabbed a
full mug of coffee and went to my study to do my next daily practice. I wrote my dream report, starting with the
date and the title I had chosen for my dream. I might be missing certain details
by now, but I had the essence, and key incidents returned to me, vivid and
strong, as I wrote. I noted my feelings, and added a few lines about the
connection between this dream and my other dreams and “far memories” of a British
pilot in the Second World War. I added a further note on synchronicity, my
sighting of the RN’s license plate. This morning I did not record three sidewalk sightings. The RN was enough.
I was now ready to play another game
that is part of my everyday practice. I did a bit of bibliomancy. The word means
divination by the book. People have done it with sacred and special books, like the Bible the
Koran or the poetry of Rumi or Dante or Homer, for as long as humans have had
books.
I do my book-dipping with whatever
book falls to hand. On the day I walked with the dream of the pilot, I decided
to go back to Heraclitus. The work of this often enigmatic Greek philosopher
survives only in fragments. Because of their brevity, they are good to consult
if you would rather play with a sentence than a longer passage.
I opened Charles Kahn’s edition of
Heraclitus casually, with my non-dominant hand. My eye fell on a one-liner. The
translation read: Gods and men honor those who have fallen in battle. In
part of myself, I wanted to ignore that message and try again. The line spoke
of war and violence and we have quite enough of those in my world.
But my dream was still with me, the
dream that took me into the life of a brave man who was killed in a necessary
war, a war for humanity against the unspeakable evil that had taken possession
of Germany under Hitler. Once again, I felt a deep sense of confirmation, a
firmer hand on my shoulder. Gods and men honor those who are fallen in battle. I thought of another line in Heraclius, about
the dead and the living are constantly engaged, how the fortunes of mortals and
immortals interweave, how we may live in the dead and they may live in us.
I felt the deep, deep sense of recognition
and gratitude and blessing. I wrote a one-liner
from this:
I am in communion with the dead. They are alive in me, and I am alive in them.
Text partly adapted from Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.
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