It seems to me that some glimpses of beauty call to be seen in defined frames. During the recent long and stunning Autumn, I recorded many such instances during ordinary walks in ordinary settings.
not by a thread
I dangle
by my petiole
not holding on
but letting go
so gradually
toward my only flight
Robins evaded my camera. They chose the quietest spots striped with shade along an asphalt trail to forage. Cottonwood seeds lined the trail and clover continued the white lace pattern in adjacent grass. This looked like the place for a wedding processional.
elongated day
Cottonwood seeds, lighthearted
time-lapsed snowstorm
An unofficial path meanders from lakeshore, to hillside, and across a meadow. The smell of humus hangs suspended. The trail keeps drawing my attention downward so as not to stumble among Wild Sarsaparillas and Wood Anemones.
the thrill of the small
path made for one foot and then
just one foot again
The skinny trail I walk enhances my awe of the Mississippi. Water licks the shore three feet to my right. The trail fades to open forest floor. I look up, and am dazzled by the canopy of bright May. Massive slabs of yellow rock lay scattered ahead. I hike over them and pick up the trail again. I’m thinking so many people must have been drawn to this very place over thousands of years.
who else walked this ground
thousands of years of footfalls
by the deep river
As a college student majoring in English, I loved reading Wordsworth. I still relate to his process of walking in nature and listening as part of the writing process. The poem featured in this post came to me that way.
Face
These are either deep-set eyes
or two hollow knots in a tree
and around them a winding wrinkled trunk
or else it is my ancient spiritual body
with the eyes of my natural face.
Under my pillow and facing upward on the bed a 3×5 inch plastic box brought the always-manifesting radio of sublime reality from the ethers into my rebellious 13-year-old ear. The King Biscuit Flour Hour and Roger Daltrey’s insistence, “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me . . .” (Townshend, 1969). From down the hall fading trumpets announced The Tonight Show where parents watched tv. It was 1973. I lay awake long past bedtime hearing a witch’s brew of electric blues and the wine of Dionysian surrender. The radio filled me with anticipation of life in a world where I could flip a plastic switch and feel my heart expand as big as the sky.
I tried for a clear station each night, but Sunday night meant the King Biscuit Flour Hour from Little Rock, Arkansas; it came in loudest and clearest of any good music all week. Otherwise a transistor radio in Southern Indiana could only offer overwhelming static with occasional glimpses into the world out there.
In 1975 I saw the film Tommy and then sat in a tree in my wooded back yard for three days straight except for meals and sleeping. Whatever sense I’d made about life at 13 had melted down like a clock in a Salvador Dali painting. I started to feel the reality that not only do I have a radio; I hear a grand radio intimating a larger reality. And not only do I hear this radio; I am a radio receiver. And not only am I a radio receiver, but this is the human condition.
As a teen I loved hearing music from several states away. Now I understand that what I loved about it was how it spoke to me from archetypal states away. That’s why I call it the radio of sublime reality. Its airwaves travel on poetry, art, inspiration, intuition, relationships, mythology, synchronicity, nature, mystical experiences, mind-body connections, and dreams. The whisperings of angels bring the blueprints for collaboration with greatness from the unseen world. These channels bring human life into the realm of the gods (Pressfield, 2002).
There are also internal hackers; identity thieves, the psychological equivalent of computer viruses – what we used to call static back in the day. Patañjali, who wrote the commensurate guide to yoga philosophy, described what interferes with soul life as “the wheel of desire (kama), anger (krodha), greed (lobha), infatuation (moha), pride (mada) and malice (matsara)” (Iyengar, 2002). We become ensnared by them partly through lack of discernment.
Egos cause interference on sublime radio stations. Our stupendous potential competes with the misreading of signals. As years pass, large decisions and small ones accumulate and our identity reflects to whom we’ve listened.
I once bought a used Honda Accord with a cracked engine block that burned to toast on a rural highway, leaving me walking on the shoulder and changing a lot of plans. I’d tried to listen to my intuition when I bought the car but was seduced by statistics about the model’s longevity. I’d wanted to feel in control through logic and didn’t heed the inner voice that said, “Don’t pay five dollars for that dud.”
After that, I needed to buy a car in a day. A salesperson showed me a lightly used Geo Prizm and a few other cars. The generic style of the Prizm underwhelmed me, but I consulted my intuition and it said “Yes! That’s the one!” The car proved a plain-Jane wonder. It needed incredibly little maintenance, lasted seventeen years, and turned out to have a Toyota engine. Discernment errors cost, and discernment successes turbo-charge what can happen in life.
My own search for a loud and clear channel of the sublime led me to find that dreams are my King Biscuit Flour Hour. They stream the purest messages. The dream station comes in well because it airs while my ego sleeps. The sublimely real world speaks to us all the time. At night, when the ego’s will is turned off, there’s a special opportunity to receive a clearer message in the form of a dream.
The Oglála Lakȟóta Oyáte Chief Tȟašúŋke Witkó (Lakota: “Tȟašúŋke Witkó” in Standard Lakota Orthography,[2] IPA: /tχaˈʃʊ̃kɛ witˈkɔ/, lit. ”His-Horse-Is-Crazy”) worked with his dreams throughout his adult life striving to live the calling of his initial vision: He returned from a quest for guidance as a youth with a waking-dream of a Rider painted with a zig-zag of lightning across his face and hailstones on his body. The rider careened toward war on a dancing ephemeral horse whose hooves never touched the ground. The Lakota people called this man His-Horse-Is-Crazy because of the horse of his vision and his calling to be the rider. He worked with dreams to actualize the reality of Rider on His Crazy Horse: bold, austere, intuitive, fierce, visionary, and invulnerable to arrows and bullets. Win Blevins (1995), an authority on early American plains life, wrote of Chief Tȟašúŋke Witkó’s life based on many interviews and witnesses’ reports. His vision informs and inspires what I imagine:
In 1876 Chief Tȟašúŋke Witkó epitomized his name when warriors and soldiers formed opposing lines at the start of the Battle of the Greasy Grass (also called The Little Bighorn). He rode out of the line of warriors toward the line of U.S. soldiers. As a solitary dancer in the field between the conflict, he and his horse whirled like a mercurial storm as he taunted the soldiers. They sent a hail of bullets, and none hit him. After enticing the soldiers to waste a lot of ammunition, he rode back to his group, asked them to wait, and rode back into the zen frontier swaying and flourishing. He heckled the soldiers while bullets roared around him and his long hair sculpted the air in arcs. He veered back to the warriors and asked them to wait just a little longer. Then he rode again into the fury of soldiers’ gunfire as the Rider on His Crazy Horse, manifesting a living, timeless dream infusing its light in the circumstances of life and death. Uninjured, he rejoined his group and they charged into battle.
I’ve come to understand by working with dreams that a daytime mode itself doesn’t create reality. During sleep, the ego disengages, relinquishes the driver’s seat, doesn’t make decisions. At night dreams broadcast symbolic stories to help the dreamer pierce through murkiness and make sharp decisions about daytime experiences. Dreams often speak in symbols with culturally diverse, ancient roots. If someone remembers a dream and works with it skillfully, the dream can help sort errant ideas from accurate perceptions.
In my work as a Jungian dream therapist I sometimes hear comparisons between what happened in a dream to the situation in someone’s waking life. The dreamer may say, “In the dream, I’m walking to work on the sidewalk downtown but the sidewalk is blue – not like real life. The front door opens into a river and now I’m swimming in it . . .” The comment about “real life” suggests the dreamer assumes reality happens during waking experiences not non-waking hours. That viewpoint presumes that the ego is the only part of the psyche able to know the truth. Most Westerners see life that way.
But consider this: The ego’s daytime mode is as real as the ego is conscious. Delusions, compulsions, confusion and misinterpretations; or inspiration, relationship, vision and acuity. These often mingle in complex ways during waking hours. At night, truth streams in from the dream world.
In 1840 the Transcendental writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (1960) reported this dream:
I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said “This must thou eat.” And I ate the world.
Eating the world-apple can mean digesting the fruit of the tree of discernment, learning how to hear, on inner frequencies, the difference between what’s generative and what’s phony or destructive.
Introspection supports the sorting process between constructive and destructive. In dreams this process of becoming more conscious can be symbolized as eating an apple. The meaning stems from folklore and mythology (Snow White, The Golden Bird), but most notably from the story of the Garden of Eden and the tree with the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. From a Jungian perspective Adam and Eve were inexperienced. When they ate the apple, they came down to Earth, lived more fully, and had a chance to learn about themselves. That was how they became more aware.
In Sūtra IV.23, Patañjali describes how to attune to soul life: “Consciousness is the bridge between nature and soul, and its conjunction is either illumined by the seer or tainted by the seen. The wise yogi frees consciousness from the qualities of nature; he keeps it clean so that it is reflected without distortion both by the seer and the seen” (Iyengar, p. 272).
We’re equipped to do that. We are radio receivers. We’re dreamers. We have visions. We either choose the wheel of desire, pride, greed, and other destructive broadcasts inside, or we act on the still small voice, the inner muse, our wildest dreams, or angels with blueprints.
Life continually presents these options. Dreams continually clarify choices and catalyze change. The Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible shares the dreams and visions of its author from about 1,900 years ago. That was then. We dream today. The radio of sublime reality breathes fire all day and all night. It speaks to each of us, and we’re not identical people seeking achievement of a general perfection. We each have our own zen frontier to enter and our own mission to dare. All the while, we’re streaming live. We don’t need someone else’s revelation or a satellite to show us what’s real. We are already dreaming.
Radio Poem
My radio speaks in tongues
about the remnants of the answer
floating on the wind
like dried leaves in revelry
My radio hums like bees
building a prismatic nectar palace
in devotion to a mission, a queen
and flowers of vibration so stirring
that when I hear this revelation
about the evaporation of the answer
I myself am spoken, and sung
and I become the radio.
References
Blevins, W. (1995). Stone Song: A novel of the life of Crazy Horse. New York, NY: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Emerson, R. W. (1960). The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by W.H. Gilman et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press.
Iyengar, B.K.S. (2002). Light on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali. London, England: Thorsons.
Pressfield, S. (2002). The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. New York, NY: Black Irish Entertainment LLC.
Townshend, P. (1969). Tommy. London, England: Decca/MCA.
Wikipedia. “Crazy Horse” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse. Accessed May 25, 2020.
While supernovas explode in space, I live on Earth in a body made of stardust. While I can’t fathom creation, the Creator still speaks to me in my dreams. The poem that follows, The Nature of Our Relationship, centers on seeking relationship with the Creator of infinite possibilities.
In A Supernova Garden
I sought you everywhere
traveled the world imagining us
face to face breath mixing breath
I left the Earth without having found you
cruised past the moon Saturn Pluto
the long and winding Milky Way
I imagined your warm voice in the soundless
universe I searched through gardens
of blossoming magenta cherry and saffron
supernovas until I began to recognize your face
the stars that freckle
your unfathomable countenance
and from within
a dream I heard you call me beyond
the universe and I looked
to your voice and beheld the edges
of a multiverse reaching outward
at the same time as the universe
reaches inward.
I dreamed long ago of a tiger wearing a dhoti (a white cloth wrapped around her pelvis), sitting in a cage of iron bars, with her body twisted completely in knots, legs forward and up, ankles behind head, sitting still and quiet in a yoga pose. She seemed accepting and friendly.
The dream was one of a series that gave me instructions, an assignment, and messages about how to find the doorway into my real life.
Since childhood, I had both an ambition to achieve and reckless ferocity. Over time, my inner tiger’s pursuits formed a strong network of habits I mistook for my identity. In a conversation about the weather, the tiger sought to win. On a contemplative walk with a friend, the tiger schemed underneath to be the wiser. In choices between thinking and listening, the tiger lay ready to leap out of my mouth with knowledge about this and experience about that.
Carl Jung wrote that people who want to become conscious need to go against their own nature. My dream said I could find peace and inner warmth by developing strength of character and flexibility – the pathways of yoga. If a wild tiger represents fiery desire and aggression, then a quiet, efficient furnace symbolizes friendly mastery of that nature. The path of getting there appears in the dream as the practice of yoga.
In yoga, restraint, containment and devotion propel incremental changes. These changes function like a serum for someone with amnesia. Who was that person who wreaked havoc in my life before? Who is this better person I’m discovering underneath layers of programming? Clarity bubbles up like springs of hope. I start to be moved by beauty, stirred by imagination, awakened to subtlety. The nuances of life whisper graces into silent spaces.
The dream showed that a tiger without pride and violence eclipses expectations of reality. A tiger in a cage in Dwi Pada Sirsasana overcomes her larger opponent (Iyengar, “Light on Yoga” 307). The yoga tiger courageously abstains from threatening others. She eats her own desire. She practices. The flames of the yoga tiger consume her anger on the inside. She wins contentment. Then the fire burns in her belly like a well-tamed furnace.
Photo by April Hayes, April Rain Photography
Habits that portray themselves as an identity stand in the way of identity. But this is like a Chinese finger puzzle: How can a false identity be identified by itself? If I see everything through the lens of a false identity then how can I see what’s false about it?
This is where dreams come in. Carl Jung recognized a type of dream that speaks from a deep layer of the psyche with understanding of the dreamer’s greatest potential and deepest character. Various Native American peoples called this type of dream a “big dream,” and Jung respectfully used this term as well. Often these dreams express urgency, intensity, profound beauty, grand stories, inscrutable or unusual imagery, or vivid colors.
Writing of his experiences with the Huron people in the 1600s, Paul Ragueneau wrote that “The Hurons believe that our soul has desires other than our conscious ones, which are both natural and hidden, made known to us through dreams, which are its language. When these desires are accomplished, the soul is satisfied” (Thwaites, ed., 33: 195).
Consider one of the earliest remembered dreams of Jung from when he was about four (Jung).
The vicarage stood quite alone near Laufen castle, and there was a big meadow stretching back from the sexton’s farm. In the dream, I was in this meadow. Suddenly I discovered a dark, rectangular, stone-lined hole in the ground. I had never seen it before. I ran forward curiously and peered down into it. Then I saw a stone stairway leading down. Hesitantly and fearfully, I descended.
At the bottom was a doorway with a round arch, closed off by a green curtain. It was a big heavy curtain of worked stuff like brocade, and it looked very sumptuous. Curious to see what might be hidden behind, I pushed it aside.
I saw before me in the dim light a rectangular chamber about thirty feet long. The ceiling was arched and of hewn stone. The floor was laid with flagstones, and in the center, a red carpet ran from the entrance to a low platform. On this stood a wonderfully rich golden throne. I am not certain, but perhaps a red cushion lay on its seat.
It was a magnificent throne, a real king’s throne in a fairy tale. Something was standing on it which I thought at first was a tree trunk twelve to fifteen feet high and about one and a half to two feet thick. It was a huge thing, reaching almost to the ceiling. But it was of a curious composition: it was made of skin and naked flesh, and on top there was something like a rounded head with no face and no hair. On the very top of the head was a single eye, gazing motionlessly upward.
It was fairly light in the room, although there were no windows and no apparent source of light. Above the head, however, was an aura of brightness. The thing did not move, yet I had the feeling that it might at any moment crawl off the throne like a worm and creep toward me.
I was paralyzed with terror. At that moment I heard from outside and above me my mother’s voice. She called out, “Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater!” That intensified my terror still more, and I awoke sweating and scared to death.
Jung’s dream showed his future self as a creative conduit for modern understanding of the inner world. As this carrier of divine creative impulses on Earth, symbolized by the tree-like phallus, he was to look up and receive inspirations from the unconscious mind, no matter how unexpected or unearthly they seemed.
He could expect that his conventional internal voice of safety and security (the mother) would try to scare him away from his calling.
In times past, people of a well-led kingdom understood the king or queen as a divinely called and capable representative of God’s goodwill toward the people. They expected wisdom from the king’s or queen’s decisions, and this created well-being in the kingdom. Jung’s big dream showed that his greatest potential and deepest character was to discover and embody a creative voice that would bring revelations from the unconscious into the modern world, like a king that brings good fortune to others. That was the gift he brought, and at the same time, his sacred identity.
Though big dreams come at various stages in life, often the earliest remembered dreams from childhood are big dreams. Young children, often still very open to the unconscious mind, tend to feel their soul’s hopes and desires. They receive dreams with a minimum of censorship and tampering by their egos. These big dreams talk about the possibilities of life. They intimate the great benefit this particular person could bring to the world, the one-of-a-kind personality this person could become while working to complete the endeavor of this particular, never-to-be-repeated life. It’s written in the holy, ancient stars where the dream came from. Something astounding could happen if this person will choose boldly. A big dream tells about a big life.
In ancient Chinese culture, to receive “the mandate of heaven” means to become t’ien-tzu, the son of heaven (Miyuki18). In parallel terms, John’s Gospel in the Christian Bible shows the Pharisees horrified that Jesus calls himself “Son of God.” Jesus reminds them of the passage in Hebrew law in which God speaks to them, “I say you are gods.” (Alexander 205; Sanford 65). He seems to have wanted them to realize that he was living his mandate of heaven, and they were meant to also. The whole concept of yoga is based on living out a calling and gaining freedom from small-minded internal programming. “If dharma is the seed of yoga, kaivalya (emancipation) is its fruit.” (Iyengar, “Light on the Yoga Sutras” 4).
We’re born for two lives. The big life echoes inside from the time of early childhood. It’s the face before you were born. It may appear in pretend games, passionate interests, and in earliest-remembered dreams. It radiates behind the façade of a small life. It’s as if an eagle’s egg were dropped into a nest of border-patrol drones. After hatching, she tries to fit in and succeed. She patrols like a machine, following orders. If she’s lucky, she becomes forlorn, wanders around searching for what’s wrong with her life, and discovers the exquisite curves of her flight patterns.
In my experience, the how-to manual for leaving the small life is in a person’s dreams. Another dream of mine that gave such instructions was this:
I see a superstar basketball player – a tall African American man. I want to be like him. Then the dream shows a montage of his history – his long record of small successes that gradually make him skillful. Extreme perseverance in small victories. No overnight sensation. No rebellious drama.
Dismantling my small life requires one effort after another after another. The desire for grand achievement reflects a hunger for accomplishment of a soulful endeavor. This means gradually gaining skill, completing tasks, and winning points by relinquishing procrastination, discouragement, torpor and other programming – 2 points at a time.
Compared to living by trial-and-error, the inner path propels personal development at the speed of light. The demise of the small life fires the ignition of the big life. Each effort of dismantling the small life is like a spark that warms the engine of a Lambourgini. When the car comes alive, it may become clearer where to go. The dismantling of a small life gives rise to illumination. Illumination shines on the unseen world. Like a getaway vehicle in the inner world, the purposeful endeavor of a big life has the engine, the acceleration, the spark, and the fire to burn up the small life like burning up the streets.
Each of us is born with a thirst for certain experiences paired with a need to resolve inner problems. A life pulls as if magnetized toward learning that’s tailored to the person. Those experiences offer opportunities to master the inner jungle.
The more mastery there is, the less background static. Less static equals more clarity. More clarity brings the ability to recognize how and where the small life programming is operating. This recognition brings the great power to make choices that further pierce and dismantle the small life.
My experience with dreams tells me that each person has a priceless, matchless potential often revealed in early childhood. The uncovering and bringing into life of that potential is a process that reveals, solidifies, purifies, and clarifies the person’s most superior character. The desires of the big life burn up the desires of the small life.
Each of us is invited to deliver a boon from heaven; to play a role no one else can, in propelling personal and planetary evolution. It’s the Buddhist mandate, the Jewish law, the Christian call, the yogic bedrock.
By being born, each of us has been invited to uncover and bring to life a unique and sacred identity on Earth. Bringing that identity to life also means accomplishing a task for the sake of the greater good.
My deeper identity is like an ancient temple buried in layers of earth. If I dig out the temple, I excavate a remnant from a timeless place – from the realm of eternity rather than the dust of a hillside.
We are the carriers of immense value, like the Hebrews who carried the Arc of the Covenant. We are each entrusted with manifesting our sacred identity in this life. Archeologists dig for what lies in the past. We can dig for what belongs to the future.
Morning From Ashes
Before I’m born, my big dream
wanders the land pining for a big life.
I come down to Earth, make a mess
of my life, then sort out its component parts,
the dirt from poppy seeds, jewels
from poison berries. My big dream sweeps in
one night with news from the ancient stars
and a proposal for us to passionately unite
in an outrageous endeavor until death do us part.
That dream has no retirement plan.
My big life seeks me, hunts me, wants me,
recklessly careens toward reckoning,
burning the firebird of my selfish desires to ashes
with flame rising, wing sweeping
the sins of the fathers spent in creation
of the child who sings light into morning.
Works Cited
Alexander, Victor. Aramaic New Testament.CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.
Iyengar, B.K.S.Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali. Harper Collins Publishers, 1993.
Iyengar, B.K.S.Light on Yoga. Schocken Books Inc., 1976.
Jung, Carl. “The Man-Eater.” World Dream Bank, 1879, www.worlddreambank.org/M/MANEATER.HTM. Accessed May 20, 2019.
Sanford, John A. The Kingdom Within: The Inner Meaning of Jesus’ Sayings.Harper San Francisco, 1987.
Spiegelman, Marvin J. and Mokusen, Miyuki. Buddhism and Jungian Psychology. New Falcon Publications, 1994.
Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791. Burrows Brothers, 1896-1901, 73 vols.