At the Stag Tree

 

At the Stag Tree

I am the antlered one.
I raise living bones
as taproots into the sky
to draw down the strength of heaven.

I am sure-footed, potent,
a warrior in love,
with power to read the land,
to see behind me and around me.

I grow my own crown, royal,
magnificent, and have the wisdom
to give up its burden
when the year grows old.

I come here, to the hickory,
to rub out my royalty,
to drop the burden of my crown
and grow again, stronger than before.

September 15, 2018

- lines composed in an exercise to become Animal Speakers in my "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" retreat in the green fairyland of northern Bohemia

The Page You’ll Dare to Read to a Friend

As a young man, Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine poet, essayist and maker of imaginal worlds, wrote this: 

I have already written more than one book in order to write, perhaps, one page. The page that justifies me, that summarizes my destiny, the one that perhaps only the attending angels will hear when Judgment Day arrives.
--

Hang on - can Borges really be saying that he (and we) must deliver the right page to the angel in order to be saved on the day of Judgment? That may be as hard as the flinty Calvinist belief of some of my father's Scottish family that we are damned unless we are born among the elect, and damned even so unless our lives are justified by works. I fled that doctrine very early, though those who have observed me working round the clock complain that it remains a sleeper (or rather, unsleeping) agent in me. I won't dispute that the creative spirit is stirred by a "divine unrest", whatever its source. 

Can Borges be serious when he says that to produce that one saving page, we may need to write "more than one book"? That's enough to make any aspiring writer break a sweat. -

Mercifully, in the last lines of his essay, young Borges relents. He wants

Simply, the page that, at dusk, upon the resolved truth of day's end, at sunset, with its dark and fresh breeze and girls glowing against the street, I would dare to read to a friend.

"A page I would dare to read to a friend." Now, that sounds manageable. And think what can be accomplished within a page! Borges' published essays are brilliant miniatures, often only a page in length, as are the stories collected in El Hacedor ("The Maker"). Even his astonishing story "The Aleph", in which his word magic brings a kabbalist legend alive and allows us to see, for a shimmering moment, a sphere the size of a coin that contains universal space - complete with tigers and pistons, tides and armies and a woman in Inverness with her "haughty body" and "violent hair" and the cancer in her breast - fills less than a dozen pages.-

-

A page a day. In my writing workshops *, one of the few requirements I set for participants is: bring us one page every day, in any genre, that you are willing to read to the group. When you go home, do the same, Write one page you would dare to read to a friend at the end of the day. It may simply be a page from your journal, which may be the most important book you will even write. How does that sound to you?   

[1] "A Profession of Literary Faith" (1926) translated by Susan Jill Levine, in Eliot Weinberger (ed) Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).

You don't give a lion a haircut

I spent the whole night, while my body slept, helping people to find and shape stories. With some, this meant helping them to find their voice, to speak in front of others, free of text, and to release their stories from the clutter of biography and explanation. First the adventure, later the discussion. With others, it meant getting the right words to line up together on a page. So many pages! Some beautiful creamy art paper, others veined like parchment, some ruled in composition books, others quite unruly.
    Some of the stories came from dreams. Some grew from the slightest wisp, the merest snippet from the night. Some were necklace stories, strung like bright beads on a string of incidents from the speaking land: the caw of that crow, the fall of that card, the vanity plate that read Camelot.
    Some were the work of literary privateers, given permission to steal a little from others. Some were inspired by shelf elves who arranged for a certain book to turn up or vanish at a creative moment.
   The unstoppable stories were the ones that had been seeking the teller for years, even a whole lifetime. I helped people shape these wild ones too, but only a little. You don’t give a haircut to a lion.

When I left my bed to walk my dog in the morning light, I felt deeply satisfied, the kind of satisfied when you have done a job that you chose to do as well as you can. Helping people find their best stories, and tell them so well that others want to hear them, is one of my greatest pleasures. And one of the greatest gifts of the Active Dreaming methods I have created is that we are forever encouraging each other to become both storytellers and story makers.

I will have the pleasure on embodying this dream at two beautiful physical locations where I am leading my 5-day residential retreat "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" this year: at Mosswood Hollow near Seattle in May and at Ryzmburk near Česká Skalice in the Czech Republic in August.

photo: Path of Magic at Mosswood Hollow by RM

Dream Telepathy on Running a Writing Retreat

Here’s example of long-range telepathy at work between a dreaming and a waking mind that involves the writing process.
   I kept vampire hours that night, mining old journals for material for new writing. I paused from time to time to look at plans for my writing retreat, “Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming”.
    I was ready to go to bed when I received an email from my friend Ana Maria Stefanescu, who hosts my workshops in the mountains of Romania. She reported that she had just awakened from a dream in which I gave her ideas and exercises she could use in a creative writing workshop she was planning to lead in Romania the following month. She woke up very excited, but still tired. Certain that she would be able to remember what she had learned, she allowed herself to drift back to sleep, then woke again to find that most of the content was gone.
     She requested me to show up in her dreams again and repeat the instructions!
     I countered with the following suggestion: "Maybe you can go back inside your dream and get Dream Robert to give you those ideas and exercises again!"
     Ana Maria agreed to try. An hour later, she reported her conversation with Dream Robert. “You gave me a wonderful exercise. You told me to take participants in my writing workshop on a journey to the place from which their truest words come.”
     Unknown to Ana Maria, I had actually led an exercise along these lines in my own writing retreats and had been looking over notes about that while she was dreaming. Such exploration inspired my poem, “A Place to Write From (Red Ink)”.

Write from the place that is raw
from the night when you lost your skin.

The episode reminded me of Mark Twain's experience of what he called "mental telegraphy" in the case The Great Bonanza book.

One afternoon, he was seized with the passionate conviction that a great book could be written about the silver bonanza in Nevada. He felt his old newspaper colleague William Wright (better known under his pen-name “Dan De Quille”) was the man to do it. But Mark Twain was so possessed by the idea that he roughed out a book outline and sample chapters to get his old friend started, in a blue haze of cigar smoke in the billiard room of his Hartford house. He was preparing to mail all this material to Wright when he received a package in the mail. Before opening the package, Mark Twain told the people with him that he was going to deliver a "prophecy"; he declared that the package contained a letter from his old friend Dan De Quille, with his drafts for a book on the Great Bonanza. And so it did.

This incident convinced Mark Twain not only that mental telegraphy is real, but that it can be strong enough to transport the complete content of a book across a continent. When he studied the exact chronology of the crossed letters, Mark Twain concluded that “mesmeric currents” had streamed from west to east. “It was your mesmeric current that flowed across the mountains & deserts three thousand miles & acted upon me.”

     Minds resonate with each other, and in doing this transfer ideas and messages, back and forth. When we send out our best thoughts,the results can be wonderfully creative, whichever way the currents are blowing. 

-

Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming is one of my favorite workshops, I am leading this five-day residential adventure at two locations this year: at magical Mosswood Hollow,in a red cedar forest 45 minutes from Seattle in May, and on a beautiful country estate at Ryzmburk near Česká Skalice in northern Bohemia, where I took the photo above, in August. Ana Maria is hosting a new four day workshop for me on magical dreaming and kairomancy at a lovely villa near Bran in Romania.

For a full account of Mark Twain's experiments in mental telegraphy, please see The Secret History of Dreaming.

A Master of the Third Eye

“You know what a master is like,” she cautioned me.

“Oh yeah.”

“He’s as likely to whack you as to talk to you.”

I climbed the last steps to the master’s hermitage resolved not to submit to any slap-in-the-face treatment.

I found him with his feet in a tub of hot water. Steam rose and the air was pleasantly scented with mountain herbs as one of his handmaidens palpated his feet. I was curious to see whether she would dry them with her lustrous black hair, that fell to the floor.

“Move the chest,” he directed me.

I contemplated the great iron-banded box without enthusiasm.

“Where?”

He indicated the far corner.

I half-lifted, half-carried the heavy trunk to the place he indicated, wondering what he kept in it.

“Now bring it back. And don’t drag it. Pick it up.”

I felt the veins bulge on my forehead as I struggled to carry out these instructions. I nearly made it back. Then the trunk slid from my grip, landing painfully on my left foot.

The master waited until I had stopped howling before he spoke again. “Why do you come to me?”

“Master, I come to you because I wish to see.”

“Then why are your pig eyes open?”

“Master?”

I realized, at that moment, that the master’s eyes were closed. I understood that I was to close my own.

“Closer,” he commanded.

I felt the stir of movement. I heard the swish of the loose silk of his garment, and pictured his arm swinging back, fist clenched. Here it comes.

I intended to duck the blow, but something kept me in place, on my knees in front of him. What was that buzzing sound? It made me think of a bee, trapped behind glass. It came closer.

I felt burning pain as something pierced me at the third eye, like a drill bit. Immediately the girl was at my side, soothing my forehead with an ointment that smelled like yoghurt.

When she left off, there was absolute stillness in the cabin. Then I heard the soft slap of water from the footbath.

I opened my eyes. There was no change in the scene. The black-haired girl squatted at the master’s feet, as before. I felt no surge of enlightenment. I did notice that one of the master’s eyes was now open. Above and between his closed eyelids, it fixed me with its blue light, cold and unwinking.

I wrote this little story during a 15-minute timed exercise while leading an adventure in "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming". It appears here unedited. The starter dough was a card I drew in a literary version of my Coincidence Card Game that included the words "third eye."I am leading "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" again this year at magical Mosswood Hollow, near Seattle, from May21-25 and in a green paradise near Česká Skalice  in the Czech Republic from September 12-16.

Image: "Watching" by Zen-Master on DeviantArt.

Story conference

I hear them at night, sometimes, east of the Well of Memory, west of the Mountains of Desire. They talk like herons after dark, like bears torn from sleep, like alien phone sex, like underground rivers, but mostly like a storytelling of crows. When the moon is old, I send my my shadow to listen.

“Back off,” says a story that might be a griffin to one of the hungry ones. “He’s mine.”
    “But I’m starving.” The smaller story is drooling.
    “Then go snack on something your own size," says the bigger story. "This is is my ride.”
    There is pushing and scuffling, and complaints from tall tales and flash fiction that has been flushed out of cover or jolted from long moonbath siestas.
    The hungry one leaves, snarling, to make a hide in the long grass by the beaver swamp.
    The one who has been scented by the big story comes along the path, humming a tune from a musical.
    He feels a stir in the air. With it comes the sense that he is being watched, or even ogled. He turns to look behind him. Nothing there.
    Something wallops him. He is knocked to his knees. The something is settling between his shoulder blades, drilling into the base of his neck, jabbing at his kidneys. He writhes and gropes behind him. He feels what may be a snout, and the hard ruthless curve of talons or claws.
    "Gotcha," says the big story.


I just concluded "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming", a writing and storytelling retreat like no other, at magical Mosswood Hollow in the foothills of the Cascades. The dates for next year's retreat are May 22-26, 2017.

When the clock is the writer's friend

Timed writing. 30 minutes max. So you can make room for it in almost any schedule, and make yourself do it when you don't want to.
    You stop when the time is up, like on Top Chef. Drop the pen, close the Word document. You're not finished? Great, that means when you return to the draft, you know exactly where to pick up. Oh yes, and since you are not on Top Chef with the clocks running in front of the cameras, you can always cheat and steal a few minutes more.
    We do this in my writing playshops. We do it every day during my writing retreat "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming." Sometimes we raise the bar. For example, you have 30 minutes, in your own space, to produce a page you can read to the group. Or: you have just 5 minutes, in the space of the whole group, to write a quick sketch that you can share.
    Yes, writers can make the clock their friend. If you have only 30 minutes or less, perfection is not on the agenda. There is simply no time to entertain the inner critic, or indulge the procrastinator. They'll come after you later, but not right now.
    In my writer's life, the clock can be a friend in larger ways. I love fierce delivery dates, like 5:00 p.m. this afternoon, or tomorrow, or the first of next month. Possibly because I used to be a journalist, accustomed to rushing copy together for almost instantaneous publication, I'm not impressed by deadlines that are too far into the future. On a certain level, I have learned that you can't really start a book (as opposed to an article) the night before a due date and expect to hand it in on time. But part of me still wants to approach any writing project, even of book length, that way. I would have thrived on the serial model of publication of both fiction and nonfiction that prevailed in the heyday of Balzac, Dickens and H.G. Wells.
   Blogging is a consolation, and a gentle workout for the writing muscles, but not the same thing.
   I don't put blog writing on a timer, just the big stuff. When I next turn the dial on my timekeeper - you can see he is a very fierce enforcer - it will be in the cause of bringing through some more pages of a new book.

Dream telepathy and writing assignments

I'm chuckling over a fresh example of long-range telepathy at work between a dreaming and a waking mind. Not the first, in my experience, that involves the writing process.
   I kept vampire hours tonight, mining old journals for material for new writing. I paused from time to time to look at ideas and exercises for creative writing that I have sketched out over the years, both for my personal use and as plans for one of my favorite workshops, "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming."
    Just as I was thinking of continuing my dreaming in bed, I received an email message from my friend Ana Maria Stefanescu n Romania, who hosted a marvelous workshop for me in the Bucegi mountains last month. She reported that - while I was reading and making notes - she dreamed that I gave her a series of ideas and exercises for a creative writing workshop she is planning to lead in Romania in December. She commented that she woke up very excited, but still tired. Certain that she would be able to remember what she had learned, she allowed herself to drift back to sleep, then woke again to find that most of the content was gone.
     She requested me to show up in her dreams again and repeat the instructions!
     I recalled that on a previous occasion, someone who dreamed they received tuition from me was not only able to recall the whole session in exact detail, but to help me fill a page in a book I was writing. Back in the period when I was working on my book Dreaming True, I received a message from a woman in California who had attended one of my programs. She wanted to thank me for the lecture I had given overnight, in her dream, in which (she said) I had summarized part of my argument very cogently in five points that I wrote on a whiteboard.
     Unknown to her, except for her dream, I had reached a stage in my book draft when I wanted to sum up part of my thesis in five points, but had only formulated the first to my satisfaction. I shot back a message to the California dreamer asking if she could retrieve her lecture notes and send them to me.  
     Right away, she sent me the five points Dream Robert had made in his lecture. They filled in, exactly, the missing bits in my book draft.  And I put them in the book with almost no editing!
     My response to my friend who lost the details of what Dream Robert was telling her about crafting a creative writing workshop? "Maybe you can go back inside your dream and get Dream Robert to give you those ideas and exercises again!"
     Ana Maria said she will try this. It took her only an hour or so to came back to me that she now recalls that Dream Robert's first exercise was to encourage writers to go to the place from which their truest words come. This was further good telepathy, and dream tracking, since (unknown to Ana Maria) I have led an exercise along these lines. I wrote a poem of my own ("A Place to Write From") on this very theme, on where I find my truest and most passionate words:

Write from the place that is raw
from the night when you lost your skin.

The poem is in my collection, Here, Everything Is Dreaming that will be published in April 2013.
     I couldn't help joking that this fine flow of telepathy may have been aided by the fact that my friend is in Romania, while I was keeping vampire hours!       

I will be leading my five-day creative writing adventure, "Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming" at magical Mosswood Hollow, near Duvall, Washington, from May 6-10, 1013.      

Because

Snoqualmie Falls, photo by R.M.

She says, "I am here because
I got stuck in a garden hose."
He says, "I am here to free my ancestors
from the stories that bind them."
She says, "I am here to find my home star."
He says, "I am here because you showed me paradise
and then told me I could not stay with you forever."
I am here because peregrine falcons
love to live on the edge in the spray of the falls.


There are dreams you should not follow;
there are pictures you should let slip from your wall.
There are memories of the future you can change.
There is one dream you must follow
so you can say to your Death, next time he calls,
"I did not leave that undone.
I did not let my courage fail me.
I did not obstruct water when it should flow."


Time rushes towards you from the future
through the teeth of a savage god.
Don't freeze in the pie-shaped office,
don't leave your body in the pizza oven.
Jump down the hole to the secret of life
before the lion comes. Find an answering flame,
play with the young girls on the pier,
keep the lively dead on speed dial,
carry Midwest mermaids to water.
Mail love apples, juggle the twelve lights,
smell the burning when rain falls through red cedars.


- Mosswood Hollow, April 2012