Ancient Mother and the Deer King

In one of my Tarot for Dreamers workshops, I asked the group to journey into the twinned images of the Empress and the Emperor, trumps III and IV.  I had powerful visions, which I sketched.

    I saw the Empress as Ancient Mother, a deep-bosomed Earth Goddess seated with or within the World Tree. From her womb she is birthing a world. From her flows a gentle inundation that feeds and nourishes a vast population - tiny in proportion to her - that is gathered around her. Above her, the branches of the World Tree form the exact shape of a tremendous rack of antlers. At the same time, they are taproots reaching into the Sky World. One-liner for her: "Praise and serve the Mother and re-enchant the world."

    I saw the Emperor as the Deer King, wearing an antlered crown that exactly reproduces the shape of the branches or sky roots of the World Tree. In a total re-visioning of the classic male-domineering Red Emperor of conventional Tarot, this is the sacred king whose power is the gift of the goddess and who joins with her in sacred union. One-liner for him: "The power of the true king is the gift of the Goddess."

The cherry trees are disconsolate lovers

The cherry trees are disconsolate lovers
they can’t hold their pink smiles
after the unkindness of that night.
The wind here is straight from Chicago
it will snap you unless you bend.
The news from far-off money towns
is the clamor of falling towers.

Yet my woolly dog is happy chasing
a well-chewed stick and a wet spaniel,
a green-headed duck is talking quarks
with a brown-headed duck on the lake shore
and my friend is reading poems of spring
in a language she knows only in dreams.
The wild cherries will bloom again.

-       -   Lines in the Park, April 9, 2012

Shamanism & Healing on the Dream Show April 10

Can we look to ancient shamanic practice to reduce health costs, promote healing, restore soul to medicine and balance to our lives and our relations with the Earth? Bonnie Horrigan's answer is forthright: "Tens of thousands of years of shamanism says that we can."

Bonnie Horrigan

    Bonnie is my guest on the my next "Way of the Dreamer" radio show on healthylife.net, LIVE on Tuesday April 10th. Our theme is Shamanism, Dreaming and Healing and I look forward to a very lively conversation.
    Bonnie J. Horrigan, co-founder and former publisher of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, a breakthrough medical journal examining alternative and cross-cultural healing practices and the relationship of the human spirit to health and healing.  She is currently editorial director for EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing, a new medical journal that examines the healing arts, spirituality and consciousness. Bonnie co-founded and serves on the board of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners, a non-profit organization dedicated to the assisting the re-emergence of spiritual healing in our culture. She is the author of Red Moon Passage and Voices of Integrative Medicine.
    You can listen in to the show live on healthylife.net from 9-10 AM Pacific time, which is 12 noon-1 PM Eastern, on April 10th; or access the archive and download or listen to previous shows here.

Soul Theft and After: The Butterfly Return

A few days ago, I was saddened to see this sign tacked to a tree on my street. I remembered when those vividly colored solar butterflies appeared on the block, ready to flutter their wings in a shaft of sunlight. I thought it was very sweet that a young woman renting a street-level apartment had decided to brighten the sidewalk in front of her building, and hoped that passers-by would respect her gift.   
    The theft of the solar butterflies made me think about theft of soul. In Greek, the word psyche means both "butterfly" and "soul". In many cultures, butterflies are a metaphor for soul, and for growing soul, because of their amazing life cycle of metamorphosis. They go through four stages, in each of which they appear entirely different. They are born inside eggs. They emerge as caterpillars (or larvae) shedding their skins several times as they get bigger. Then they produce their own crucible of transforming: the chrysalis, inside which their tissues break down and they liquefy, on the way to emerging in a new form, ready to fly. Talk about earning your wings!
     This morning, the J'accuse was gone from the tree. It seems to have done the trick; the solar butterflies are back on their posts.

    The homecoming of the solar butterflies is a happy reminder that while pieces of soul can be lost or stolen in any life on the planet, soul can also be returned. Sometimes that requires us to recognize what we have lost, and speak our truth. Sometimes it requires us to take inventory of the souls we may have taken; for example, by holding on to a part of someone with whom we once shared a relationship.
    The sun is coming out from behind the clouds. I want to see those wings flutter and shine.

Dream Islands

Marge Nelk, "Island Monster"

There is a lovely younger woman whose skin glows like pearls, and a stocky little man with frizzy red hair and beard who has been watching me for some time, possibly the whole time I have been on the island.

    I have something I must do, and I leave them in their beds in a communal space we are sharing with others, to tiptoe out into the night. The air is charged with excitement and intrigue.
    Now I am off the island, back in my bed at home, where it's nearly 4:00 a.m. according to the digital clock. I could go to the bathroom, but I don't want to lose my way back to the island, so I lie on my back and make it my intention to return to the moon pearl woman and a mystery I don't yet understand.
    Time runs differently on the island. It is now broad daylight. I swim and go through a busy morning schedule on the other side of the island. The people I was with before are in East End. To get to them, I choose to hike across the middle of the island. Leaving the coast road, I follow a winding trail through forest up into the highlands. There are thrilling views across land and sea, and waterfalls and long-tailed birds in flashing colors, but the going is getting hard. There is a resort hotel up on the mountain ahead of me; maybe I can get some wheels there. But the final ascent is very steep.
    I notice a man in khakis, perhaps one of the hotel staff, slip through a door in a cliff beside the path. The door was invisible until he opened it. I follow him through. Going this route, I get to the hotel up a short flight of steps, avoiding the long hard climb. Distance is not a constant on the island; how you approach things determines how near or far you are. I am noticing now that the surface of things here is a facade. Backstage is a different reality.
    I enter the hotel lobby. There is a great hubbub, people checking our or waiting with their bags for an airport shuttle. They are leaving a conference. I recognize one woman, and several of her colleagues recognize me. They are all members of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. Did I get a message from a new committee chairperson? They are eager to recruit me for a new project. I'm non-committal, since I am not a committee person.
    I ask at the desk about getting a taxi or shuttle to East End. It seems this is a busy season; no taxis are available, and they warn me that the bus service is notoriously unreliable. Someone may be able to rent me a VW bug, which I am assured is the best vehicle for travel to East End, but this will take time to arrange.
    "Backstage!" I bark at the people at the desk. My volume is the product of excitement, rather than frustration, because I have just realized that what happened with the stairs under the cliff may be possible anywhere on the island. Step behind the facade, fold time and space. "Show me the way to Backstage!"
    Some of the people look at me as if I’m crazy. But someone at the back with a jacket and badge seems to understand, and speaks into a radio phone. Maybe I don’t need anybody’s help to find the entrance I am seeking. Maybe it will simply open with my realization that this whole island environment is a constructed reality. Maybe this is the real point of lucid dreaming. To wake ourselves up to the nature of reality construction, and our ability to change things by recognizing that no world may be as solid as it seems.

     I’m getting excited now, fully lucid inside my dream. The fact that I am on an island may be a clue to the nature of “I-lands”, locales or worlds created – generally unconsciously – from our dreams and memories and desires. Let’s see. I’ve brought in extras from dream conferences I’ve attended. I have melded Disneyland and memories of both Hawaii and Bermuda for the geography and resort setting. What about the stocky, bullet-headed guy who’s been watching me? Is he a character from previous dreams?  And who is the pearly white woman?
    Backstage. No one at the hotel desk seems willing or able to show me, so I will myself there. Backstage. Surely my desire for the moon pearl woman will get me to East End.
     BRU
     The sound, in a high male voice, comes like a clap of wind in front of my face, slightly to the right. I feel quite sure this is coming from outside myself, and also that it is a deliberate intrusion or interruption. There is the same transpersonal feeling that came when a woman’s voice said BA in my “Egyptian” vision earlier this week. But while the woman’s voice seemed to be giving an explanation and a direction, the male voice seems bent on interrupting my presence in the lucid dream. Whether or not this is also the purpose, it shakes any assumption that the dreamscape is solely mine.
    I’m off-island now, thinking things over. I am not convinced that all the characters and features of the dream are projections. While I have been in a constructed reality, other minds may have taken part in the building, and it may be shared with others, both residents and visitors, and fellow-travelers. To know more, I really need to go Backstage and find my way to East End. But this will now require a new trip.

    
As for BRU: Can it be that what I heard was Brugh, which in Ireland is the name for a domain or palace of the Sidhe, the Faery Folk? The moon pearl woman and the stocky little man would certainly not look out of place in their territory.


- from last night's dreaming




Marge Nelk is a wonderful Estonian artist and "illusionista"; for more of her work, journey here.

Meeting my boy authors in the Dead Poets' Library

One of the places I love to go for creative inspiration is a Secret Library. The books are alive; open any one and you are magically transported into the realm for which it is a record and a key. Some of the books fly around on their own when not leashed to a long table or placed inside the fine mesh of bird cages of exquisite design.
     This is a place of dead poets who are very much alive. I have had many encounters with W.B.Yeats in the Secret Library. I was reckless enough to describe some of these in detail in my Dreamers' Book of the Dead on the principle well stated by Mark Twain (who is also no stranger to these premises) that "I don't want to hear about the Moon from someone who hasn't been there."
     The doors to the Secret Library open in dream, and through memory, and are oiled by the practice of going there and bringing back gifts and doing something creative with those gifts. I wrote the last phrase a little nervously, because I am aware I have yet to fulfill assignments given to me by the fiercest of the mentors I have ever encountered in my Secret Library.

I go up the stones steps and through the glass doors on a fine spring day when the fruit trees are in flower and the street is full of cheerful bicyclists in bright colors. I nod to the Librarian. I notice an unusual stir of activity in the lobby and the main reading room. These spaces are crowded with people, some familiar. I see Yeats in the distance, and Tolkien and C.S. Lewis with their pipes and pots of beer, and RLS romantically attired in Scottish dress. I see Jung, with a flash of kingfisher blue in the field around his three-piece woolen suit; and the bard with the silver brooch; and Borges in the corner, with a jeweler’s glass.
    I would love to consult with all of them. I'm not going to waste a second questioning whether they are real figures or figments of my imagination, as long as they can give me some good stuff, maybe the makings of a new book.
    But three boys block my way, clamoring for my attention. I would guess their ages as six, nine and twelve. They are very familiar. I have seen them in family photo albums, and in dreams.
    "What do you want?"
    "We've been telling you," says the six-year-old.
    "We've told you again and again, in dream after dream," says the twelve-year-old.
    "And you wouldn't listen," says nine-year-old Robert. Did I really have that many freckles when I was nine?

 "I’m listening now," I tell them. "What do you want?"

“I want a train,” says Six.

“I want toy soldiers,” says Nine

“I want girls, but not the yucky kind, and Nazis to fight,” says Twelve.

“I want a Bear,” says Six.

“I want a Lion,” says Nine.

“I want an Eagle,” says Twelve.

“I want my father,” says Six.

“I want my sister,” says Nine.

“I want the Mage of the Purple Mountain,” says Twelve.

They tell me, as a chorus: “You should listen to us much more than you do. We are the ones who can help you write the best book you have ever written, the one that everyone will want to read."
     I'm listening now.

Walking with dreams

A simple everyday practice I enjoy is to walk with a dream (my own or someone else's) and see what comes to me, gently and spontaneously, as its memory lingers.
     Sometimes the dream comes alive again, and I find myself slipping back inside, noticing things I forgot when I woke up. Letting my mind as well as my feet ramble, I can make creative connections. The world may give me a second opinion on the dream through the play of synchronicity. I may enter into a mental dialogue with a dream character, which can help to illuminate whether that dream figure is an aspect of myself, or another person, or both.
     That was my theme on my dream walk this morning. In the scene from last night's dreams that most intrigued me, I am with an older male friend I have not seen in many years in ordinary reality. I need to obtain an important certificate or identity document, perhaps a visa. There will be several checks, and I will be asked various questions, in a large official building where lots of people are standing in line. This process could take quite a while, and I'm always a little edgy when I have to go through situations like this.
    My friend makes everything amazingly easy. He drives me to the official building. Then, instead of joining the lines, my friend drives right inside, through a private entrance and ferries me from desk to desk, still in the car. I show my papers to a series of officials, leaning out the passenger window, and their questions are easily dealt with. All is well.
     On my walk with this dream, I thought about how life offers us a series of tests and checks, and we may be called on repeatedly to claim our identity both literally and metaphorically. My main question about the dream was: who is the man at the wheel who gets me through this process so smoothly? I am going to check in with the friend I haven't seen in years, but - though dreams are often literal and transpersonal - I have a strong hunch that on this occasion, the man at the wheel is an aspect of myself.
     So, as I walk in the park, I am making a mental inventory of phrases I would use to describe my friend to another person. 
- he is a big, strong man, a former college linebacker who likes sports
- he is a thinking/sensory type, rather than a feeling/intuitive type
- if I were to choose a tarot card to represent him, it would probably be the King of Disks
- he is a hard-nosed realist about people and situations
- he owns (or did own when I last saw him) a miniature Schnauzer
    Now I am ready to ask "What part of me?" resembles this description. Well, I am fairly big (though not as big as my friend); I am no sports fan but I did watch the NCAA semi-finals (and saw Kentucky, the team I picked to win the series, beat Louisville). I inhabit the world in a different way from my friend. I live by intuition and trust my feelings. I am a King of Cups or of Wands rather than a King of Disks. I tend to look for the best in people and situations. I do have a miniature Schnauzer, actually two of them (one very old and doddery, one young and charged with boundless energy).
    For now, my action plan, guided by my dream walk, will be simply to remember to let the part of me that is the King of Disks take charge, with pragmatism and everyday driving skills, when I face any checks or tests resembling those in the scene where my friend was at the wheel.