An End of the Year Collage

Sansaku:  An End of the Year Collage

12/31/20

Roots and wings, a paradoxical solution.  A healthy adult isn’t a dead adolescent, but an adolescent adult is a pain in the ass.  We need both roots and wings.

In terms of time, we’re all downstream.  Dump a load of karma in the river, we’ll be drinking it tomorrow, next year.  The less we darn and mend, the more we throw away.  Metaphors are vanishing.

Dylan Thomas said there was nothing he’d rather hear than people telling stories about their childhood, but they’d better talk fast or he’d begin telling his own.

Psychotherapy has been called a better narrative and Scott Peck said mental health was on on-going process of dedication to reality at all costs.  Our narrative a map that needs to be revised.  A mirror.

If something is context sensitive, even the smallest of changes can result in a completely different set of behaviors and outcomes.  It’s a therapeutic secret.  One degree in temp, the frozen starts to flow.

Resolutions create structural tension and positive dissonance.  Normally we seek to lessen and resolve internal conflict.  But the sages suggest we cultivate a taste for what is unresolved.  The gap between the ideal and the real.  Roots and wings.

A few years ago to the day, I had a video chat with Japan.  Chyako wanted me to say hello to the nephews.  I said, “Konichiwa, this is your dog-dumb uncle who can’t even talk.  Would you like to hear me bark?”

Okasan was just out of view and heard every word.  I told her, “I feel tired just thinking about those kids.  You must be exhausted.”  Chyako answered, “We were just talking about that.”  Entrained and attuned.

DH Lawrence wrote, “The race is not to the swift, but to those who stand still and let the waves go over them.”  Grief comes in waves.

Learn about health from the sick, about life from the old and dying.  Practice reflection and memory iteration.  It’s an anniversary, the end of the year, Yoko dying.

The glass we see through darkly, mostly mirror.  We don’t see things the way they are.  Waves are passing through.  We can only handle so much truth.  An overdose can damage.

Chyako tells me, “The house loves Yoko and misses her.  The clock keeps stopping; the batteries are old.  Light bulbs burn out.  Everything is breaking.  This is sad.”

Chaos theory.  Bifurcation points.  The road forks.  Psychologists have struggled with the way apparent traits and normally stable features can shift.  We think we see and then we learn and now we think we see.

Being foolish in love is not a sin, but neither is it virtue.  Jung didn’t advise against it.  Just the opposite.  I’m still thinking about Chris and John Milton.  I left him holding the metaphoric apple.

My New Year’s resolution stays the same.  I’m keeping to the process and ritual.  Basho lives.  Morning sun on snow.  We watched the full moon setting.  Chyako sitting up in bed.

Four years ago, I started a story.  It began with a vision, strange enough, of two sensuous buttes and a girl who was riding a cow.  That hasn’t changed.  I would’ve written more, but a good friend called.  It’s been a year of covid, convalescence and letting the waves wash over.

I always drift and mash.  Today I’ve cut and pasted five years of sansaku and made a collage.  It’s a time for review and reflection.  My resolution hasn’t changed.

She Didn’t Sleep That Night

Sansaku: She Didn’t Sleep That Night

12/28/20

She wasn’t asked what she wanted and when she was, she knew what the other wanted and did the best she could.  A natural but untutored empath, she enjoyed pleasing people and avoided disappointing them.   Chris developed a false sense of self, the drama of a gifted child.

Back to the night in the orchard and the night before that.  Chris looked into the mirror; it wasn’t her usual dream.  She had the same problem as Milt when he looked into the mirror at the dream bar.  He saw everyone else but himself.  Narcissus had the opposite problem.

The image Chris saw in the dream mirror was and wasn’t her.  The goddess looked back with hair like her own, but tangled in flowers and weeds.  She’d been rolling in the grass.  Her dress stained green, the color of her eyes.  The goddess didn’t speak, Chris knew.  She woke.

There are slow and gradual enlightenments, this was lightning.  Chris felt alive and awake.  She got out of bed.  The mirror was hung on the closet door.  She needed to open to see.  Her nightgown shift looked like the one in her dream.  She looked at her eyes.  They were green.

The existential light-bulb flashed and she woke a second time.  Mystics write that fifteen seconds is enough to change a life.  The dream was as real as the waking, maybe more so.  She got up to look and tuned in.  The dream image merged with the one in the mirror.

She’d gone to bed that night with windows wide open.  Pheromones in the air and subliminal notes from the orchard.  Narcissus was stuck and imprisoned.  Chris was released to be free.

She went looking for love the next night and found Milt by the fire, the guitar like a woman in his lap.  She didn’t sleep that night.

Sunday Morning Drift

Sansaku:  Sunday Morning Drift

12/27/20

I shared my template for writing a letter of recommendation with Chyako this morning.  She has one to write.  I’ve written hundreds.  I’m pleased I can write this for Colin.  He’s applying for acceptance.  No longer.  A drop-out with all of the trimmings.

Dreams might give a different recommendation.  Last night a battle with swords and trying not to be killed.  I called for a time-out and found myself in the bleachers, sitting along with the enemy team.  They didn’t seem to care.  Strange dream.  Not much of a fighter.

In one lucid dream, I read on the wall of a temple that people have come here before, what they learned, why they left.  Drop-outs like me.  I tell myself stories.  Chyako and I have chosen not to reproduce, like the Elves in Middle Earth who left on a ship for the yonder shore.

Two Buttes is a refuge, an island, a garden without walls.  Hiding in the open, well disguised.  A place of beginnings and a place to arrive.  As far as I know, no one leaves.  People come and go, that’s different.  I’m the one who keeps returning.  Over time, a stable conscious structure.

It doesn’t compare to Middle Earth.  I don’t have Tolkien’s brain.  And it’s not like Hogwarts.  That’s my brother’s realm.  Sheryll lives in Oz.  When I fell down the rabbit-hole, I ended up at Two Buttes, a presence not a person.  The characters and place composite.  Think dreams.

I use a fractal formula and iteration.  I keep going back to the buttes and the pool in Honeymoon Canyon.  The place and the people.  This is what I look like.  It’s a mirror and letter of reference.  The Inner-Under-World-Within.  Relationships are real.

CS Lewis wrote he didn’t have a soul, he was one.  He had a body.  

A Prompt

Sansaku:  A Prompt

12/25/20

We look like our lives and our lives look like us.  This includes our wounds.  Love pierced John Milton’s heart.  He tossed songs to the well.  “I feel so good it hurts.”

The affair with Chris was slow in growing.  In a tautologic bind, she came or she didn’t.  Milt was there most nights.  Waiting is patience and patience is faith.  He knew who she was, how she felt.

Chris read the Scarlet Letter her junior year in high school.  Hester was a hero and reminded her of Em.  Punished for the wild way she dressed, Chris asked.  Em said, “It keeps the riff-raff away.”  Foreshadowing.

Along with Em, Chris the co-valedictorian.  Her performance was not like December’s.  Milt sat with the Vo-Tech crowd and the other impropers.  Her graduation speech, on the other hand, very proper.

John Jacob and Joyce sat up front and were proud of their scholarly daughter.  They wouldn’t be after that night.  She didn’t come home.  In her parents’ existential world, plate tectonics shifted.  The earthquake was emotional and caused a massive psychological tsunami. 

Em played the go-between and invited Chris to the graduation party at the ranch.  Her father didn’t like the North kids and didn’t trust their friends, but for once in his life John Jacob wasn’t rigid or strict.  Fate takes advantage of errors.

She left wearing a party dress and underneath a swimming suit.  “Just in case,” the coy mistress said in her most modest voice, “we all decide to swim.”   And according to the plan, she arrived a little early.  No one else was there.  No one else invited.

The pool at Honeymoon Canyon.  A prompt.

A Well with Living Water

Sansaku:  A Well with Living Water

12/24/20

Instead of coins, John Milton tossed in songs.  Acausal cause.  Synchronicity.  Way down deep in Mexico, forty years ago, I wrote about a well.  I’d met a woman named Coyote and she lent me a copy of the I Ching.  I made a wish and dropped two pesos six times.

The yin-yang toss was number forty-eight, The Well.  In another translation, The Source.  “One must always return to the source of their true nature for fulfillment.  Penetrating to the source of humanity is the central theme in Chinese philosophy.”

The shape of the well hasn’t changed over time.  It’s a universal symbol.  We may differ in disposition and learning, but the deepest needs have stayed the same and all can draw from the well of living water.

Cinderella at the wishing well drew out a fairy godmother.  Her desire denied, she’d been dreaming.  Mice and birds came to help.  A very good omen in story.  Riding in a pumpkin-coach, she crossed into magic.

Milt sang a song to the well.  “Wake up every morning, dreams in my head, walk all around, never know what they said, but I know, I’m always thinking about you.  Like where you are, how you feel, where am I, in your mind, in your heart, want to know.”

He couldn’t see her face and dropped another verse in the well.  “If waiting is patience and patience is faith, I know, I’ve faith in you, I just wish all this waiting were through.  Like where you are, how you feel, where am I, in your mind, in your heart, want to know.”

(The sun just rose, just now.  Light bursts into the room.  Coincidental.)

Chris stepped into the courtyard, her face in the light of the fire and moon.  “This is what she looks like, where she is and how she feels.  Would you like to know what’s in her mind and heart?”  He smiled and said with the up-down shake of his head, “Show me.”  They entered the well together that night.  The water was living and spiked.

After less than a month on the job, I wrote the “About” for the blog.  It’s called “A Hundred Pots.”  The way to throw a good one, throw a hundred.  Five years and nine hundred pots later, still throwing.

Annie Dillard wrote, “One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, right away, every time.  Do not hoard what’s good.  Give it all, give it now, give freely and abundantly.  The impulse to save is the signal to spend.  Something more will arise, something better.  These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”

According to Jung the shadow test is easy to take, hard to pass.  It looked like a well in his dream.  December by his side, Dow descended.  In the heart of the heart, an underground chamber.  An old man was there, it was Dahl.  Hand extended.

Dow gave him his heart and Dahl put the heart in the heart of the well.  The small became large and beyond all proportion.  Zooming in, ever closer, the flaws, the faults and failings magnified.  Dow experienced in great detail and meaning.  Em witnessed and he felt what she saw through her eyes.  Dahl studied the pattern and said, “Good enough.”

The dream scene shifted.  They were out of the well and standing near the buttes in the afternoon sun.  Em said, “Let me look at your hand.”  Dow opened his palm.  He said, she said, it didn’t matter, they merged.  Dots connect into patterns.  The lines looked just like the heart.

Dreams need to be framed, put in context.  They make little sense by themselves, like a page pulled out of a story.  But dreams being whole are like circles and globes, you can start where you are and go round.  The pool in the honeymoon canyon, a well with living water.     

She Heard Music

Sansaku:  She Heard Music

12/23/20

“No one gets here by accident and it’s not about luck.”  Dahl

I’m often on the road in dreams.  This is odd, since I don’t travel much.  Dreams disagree, “Don’t be confused by the scale.  This is measured in time.  Great distance in the moment.”

Dreams are linked to the limbic which is active awake or asleep.  The word means border or edge.  The place in the brain where emotion and memory get together to discuss how they feel.  Unless it’s meaningful, it’s doesn’t matter.  It’s a good question, What matters?

Diogenes wasn’t Dahl’s dog.  He wasn’t a dog.  Coyotes are wild.  He chose the man and the man chose him back.  The two lived together as one.  Dahl did the talking, but Diogenes had the better nose.  Smell tastes, touches and feels.  Feeling intention.  Intent a big word.

Guggenbuhl-Craig wrote a limbic bestseller, The Emptied Soul: On the Nature of the Psychopath.  He’s convinced that a democracy whose citizens can’t sniff-out socially adapted psychopaths will be destroyed by power-hungry demagogues.  He’d never get there, but Diogenes would have pissed on you-know-who, had you-know-who showed-up.

Milt dropped a song in the well.  “Not a real girl, just a dream girl.”  He couldn’t put a face to the song.  “Looking for omens, each and every day.  Cloud in my coffee, stone in my shoe, always wondering, what they say about you.  Where you are, how you feel, where am I, in your mind, in your heart, want to know.”

The apple blossoms came early that year.  A change in the weather, the old trees knew.  Her window wide open, Chris caught the scent.  She didn’t see the full moon, not at first, just the orchard.  She heard music.

Talk About Magic

Sansaku:  Talk About Magic

12/22/20

I don’t often share sacred stories.  All kinds of reasons.  They’re hard to summarize and too long to tell.  If I feel misunderstood or interpreted, more becomes less.  It’s not about pearls and swine.

That’s the beauty with Two Buttes, they take on symbolic form.  What they look like, how they feel.  Dreams reveal the experience of living in a place like Timberline.  It’s a critical understanding.  Take the school: a hospital-zoo-road trip-sail boat-carnival-funny farm-ranch and bar.

John Milton had grandiose dreams and perceived ideals as real.  He stumbled and fell many times.  In fairy tales, that’s where the treasure is hidden.  It comes in the form of a bridge or a guide.  Something or someone helps us cross over and into a magical realm.

Milt brought a bottle and cup, his guitar and a notebook.  Depending on weather, a blanket.  His spot in the middle of the old apple tree orchard.  One night in a dream he discovered the place had a courtyard.

He didn’t excavate the ruins like an archeologist, he re-visioned like an artist and found a well.  It wasn’t made for water.  It’s curious how he knew.  He made a wish.  From then on, he sang to the well and dropped what he wrote into the depths.  He listened for an echo.

He kept the well secret and covered.  He imagined all kinds of objects the people before him had tossed.  Out of respect, he let the treasures be.  Magic is vulnerable to intrusion and easily lost.  Dreams are made of similar stuff. 

Em found hers in the clouds.  Flat on her back in a trance on the buttes, her dream-spirit-genii came out like a cloud and the lamp was her body.  A tubular-cord of conscious light connected them.  Talk about magic.

The Tunnel in the Cloud

Sansaku:  The Tunnel in the Cloud

12/21/20

The solstice in yin-yang terms is the seed of light within the darkest night of winter.  Bad traffic in my dreams.  I was headed out of town, going north.  Cars recklessly passing and close to exploding in flames a truck with tailpipe on fire.  A sign of the times or just me?

The journal is filled with paraphrased quotes.  Mary Pipher wrote that to fall in love with process is the great wisdom of the last stage in life.  And the great gift is to live in the moment.  The goal is now.

The old need the heat of the young and the young need the light of the old.  The seed in the dark of the night.  They’re planted in the journal.  Would I be disappointed if I hadn’t fucked-up as much as I did?  When I dropped out of grad school, my derelict dad was surprised.  “What’s wrong with you?”  I wanted to study dreams.

The landmarks of the soul are old.  In this reality, the clouds are aware when we’re looking.  Everything is personal, less detached.  We’ve got earth DNA in our soul and deep structural needs to connect.

When fires burn through a forest, islands of green are left in the wake.  Like the way a tornado takes out a town, but leaves a few houses intact.  There’s mystery in process.  Two Buttes is spared.

Like being old, this time of year, I go deeper into dreams.  The truck on fire reminds me, what’s happening to my world.  It’s raging all around.  We live close to Main in Durango; I hear traffic in the night.

A thousand times, Dahl painted the buttes and cloud.  Some held the magic.  He stacked and saved a pile.  Most he burned and just before the flames engulfed a painting, for one brief moment, he could see the other side.  The tunnel in the cloud.

The Connection

Sansaku:  The Connection

12/14/20

Given how much I write, it’s strange that I procrastinate.  I need to send some cards.  Greetings from Durango.  We’ve had better years, no doubt.  This one flavored with Covid and convalescence.  Chyako’s second surgery scheduled for this week.  I’ve never been more grateful.

Blossoms don’t last, they come fast and fade.  But they come every spring.  The circle unbroken.  I heard that song in my dreams last night.

Going back forty years, I wrote a story about a door, my access to the psyche.  An insistent reality.  The school had been my ship of fools and everyone a mirror.  This is what I looked like.  The place was a bar in the dream, which Timberline had been in an earlier incarnation.

I started the blog with a sentence, “Names matter.”  For me they’re like titles to stories.  Chyako has twenty-six volumes.  Beginnings matter.  I like to start over each day.  Sometimes each paragraph.

Mythic themes run together:  Eternal Recurrence, the Death-Rebirth Cycle, the Quest.  Two Worlds.  There’s a secret to crossing, which means it’s not taught.

I can’t get over the fact most books on empathy are aimed at business and gaining competitive advantage.  But what gets sold as technique can also transform.  Psychological evolution.

Dahl taught Em how to read, even though she already knew how.  “Less is more.  Find what matters.  Learn by heart.”  She memorized poems and long passages.  Dahl greatly encouraged the practice.  She thrived.

By the time Dow arrived, she recited with a voice that channeled the ages.  And sitting around the fire, the sound of wind and water, she whispered the words that wooed.  Spirits responded.

Psychosis can look like the door to the bar at the Dead Tree.  Plan to get spun.  Once you enter, it’s out of control.  Like the psychedelic on-set of dreams.  Or falling in love.  We can’t see it coming.

The first birth pushes us out, the second pulls us in.  Just like the door, we get spun.  The speed is intense and turbulent.  Best to go with the flow.  Not to narrow and focus, we need to expand.

Dahl recited poems but preferred the ones Em learned and her performance.  She had that in common with Milt.  But her audience was different.  Dahl counted for more than the crowd.  Built for contemplation not action, closer to her speed.

Except for the odd now and then, Dahl wouldn’t go to town.  Milt tried to show him off.  One thing for sure, Dahl was no trained dancing-bear.  He danced when he wanted, with whom.

His choice of quotes made it clear, he was educated a long time ago.  He didn’t read much these days, his eyes were focused elsewhere.  He depended on Dow who read more and more, not less.

Empathic from conception, the twins shared their experience of living in two worlds.  Surround sound, the stereoscopic psyche.  It gave them a huge comparative advantage.  Nothing off limits.

Dahl told the kids, “The best investment you’ll ever make is in the realm of higher emotions.”  The potential for gain is great.

I started the practice the year before I retired.  Even in the air on the way to Japan, I woke-up extra early to read journal entries from the last forty years.  A totally empathic reader, I’ve come to understand the meaning of forgiveness, self-compassion.

Mahri gave birth to herself.  The connection unique and complete.  Just imagine.  How I feel about the fool who wrote the journal. 

What Came Next

Sansaku:  What Came Next

12/9/20

Em’s favorite story as a girl is context for the dream.  Dahl told it every year and every year it changed.  “You’re older now,” he said.  It’s a once upon a time and place sort of story.  The never was that always is.

A girl like December was born to plain and simple folks.  Their only child.  The midwife said, “I’ve never seen a more beautiful baby.”  She had yellow-green eyes, very knowing.  Her parents felt blessed, but the midwife worried.  She didn’t say a word about the mark.

When the midwife heard what they wanted to call her, she made the sign, avert.  She knew it meant, beware.  The parents hadn’t seen the gesture and went ahead.  They named the baby after the goddess.

It’s common knowledge not to tempt the gods.  But Mahri bucked the curse and grew a happy girl.  Everybody liked her.  She was graced with understanding.  She could feel what people thought.

She knew the myth behind the name and little boys named Jesus don’t think they’re Christ.  She felt the same and never gave it thought.  Kids teased; she flashed her yellow-green eyes.  She didn’t mind.

The village was built on the edge of mountains and plains.  The warm, moist, low-country air met cold, dry, high-country air.  It made for tempestuous weather.  The place was famous for its wind and storms.

Huge billowing clouds and thunderheads, filled with eerie unnatural light, rose fifty thousand feet and higher.  Nothing quite compared.  Mahri did what most girls didn’t.  She wrapped herself in woolen clothes and headed for the hills.  She had a spot where she liked to sit.

Cloud gazing is an ancient art and skill that once was taught.  She learned with the help of Wind.  She met him in a dream.

Practical hard-headed types have problems with dreamers like Mahri.  They tried to tell her, “Come down from the clouds, get your feet on the ground, find a guy, get married.”  If they couldn’t see her wings, she wouldn’t tell them.

The look in her eyes was the mark of the goddess and her tendency to wander.  Mahri took to the woods and slowly gave up people.  Her dreams were more insistent and encroached upon the day.  Looking into clouds she disappeared.

She lacked the language to describe what she experienced.  It happened in her soul.  The weather she’d been watching.  The highs and low, hot and cold, moist and dry, all came together inside her.  She’d seen a few tornadoes and knew what they could do.

She remembered the myth, the implications.  She’d been chosen all along.  When you know a story as well as she knew this one, it’s a bit suspicious. It came as a whole, but also in parts.  With the help of her dream-partner, Wind, she conceived and gave birth to herself.

Parthenogenesis is not unusual in some species, but marks a miracle in humans.  Virgen birth.  Just imagine.  Mahri mothered herself with the help of a dream-being lover.  Generations told themselves the story of how they left their home and crossed the mountains to the west.

Guided by a cloud, aided by Wind, they found their way to the landmark place.  Two small and lovely buttes.  The cloud was moving, but it stayed.  Wind circled in the trees.  Mahri drank from the pool.  It was living.  What that meant was clear.

When Em was a little girl and Dahl got to this point in the story, she protested.  “You’re making fun of me now.”  Dahl assured her, “No, I’m not.  You’re just the same as her.”

That’s the dream.  She knew what came next.