Rattled

Sansaku:  Rattled

5/31/23

When we bought our first house, the realtor told me: “You’ve got serious issues with the physical world.”  He said, “Just envision what you want, tear it down, and make it happen.”

Today the roofers come.  I know it’s going bug me, bug me bad.  But I’ve got cancer on my shoulder to whisper good advice: “Too late to worry, now’s the time to trust.”  But what if it rains?  Cancer keeps calm.

I built a coyote fence at the old house – driftwood I scrounged from the river and scrub oak cut and peeled.  Incredibly weird.  It wasn’t meant to keep the coyotes out, but to advertise our presence.  The women in the neighborhood thought it beautiful.  The men were not so sure.

Yesterday, three deer were in the garden.  I opened the door and barked.  They didn’t bite.  I had to get close and polite.  Today the garden’s under siege.  I can’t exaggerate the noise, but I’ll try.

It’s fucking intense up there.  I’m gentle with the roof; this is opposite.  The roof cries uncle, “Tio Mio.”  Can’t believe how hard they’re working.  Got my respect.  The roof is screaming, “Mercy.”  Not yet.

I finished a series last night, “One Small Light.”  The Anne Frank story from Miep’s perspective.  She’s incredibly brave and equally stubborn.  Her husband, a social worker, abnormally calm, except when he’s not.  Unlike the Nazi’s pounding down the door, a ten-person crew pounds on the roof.  Epinephrine pumping.  Feeling helpless.

I dreamed of being with Miep and the underground.  Hiding out and doing what we could.  Dreams exaggerate.  The roofers have come to heal, not hurt.  Then why am I’m thinking of drinking?

One word will suffice: rattled.

Carrying a Baby

Sansaku: Carrying a Baby

5/30/23

Whenever I write that everything is best, I probably need to add: Don’t throw away unwanted parts.  Gandalf knew that even Gollum had a part to play.  It’s a cognitive emotion.  Jung said: “Instead of gods, we’ve got diseases.”  They speak through symptoms and dreams.

BBQ season began last night.  For the second time in two weeks, I exercised the saying: Moderation in all things including moderation.  Four hours both times.  Sitting with old friends around a table full of food and drink, memories, good stories.  A bounty of blessings.

When I overeat or drink, my dreams get weird.  Cars won’t start.  The jet too heavy to lift.  When I try to escape from the cops and give the car gas, the engine floods.  Very different dreams last night.

A beautiful eggshell, abalone, quicksilver sky.  Purple lilac blossoms out the window.  God gets pissed if we forget to pause and praise.  Pour a cup of tea.  Go outside.  Everything is best.

Cooking down the dreams: The first scene in an office with a group of people discussing investments.  Security and planning for the future.  Outside it starts to rain.  I’m carrying a baby.  The dream shifts.

A snowy mountain road, a mother deer and fawn.  Something’s wrong.  I go to help, but there’s nothing I can do but slow the traffic down.  Two cars are coming fast.  They don’t see me or the deer.  One starts to pass and both miss the curve.  A horrible noise.  There’s nothing I can do.  When I woke, lots of feelings.

The youngest at one of the parties, the oldest at the other.  I always feel my age.  In the dream, I’m sad there’s nothing I can do to help.  But in the other dream, we’re planning for the future and I’m carrying a baby.

Emotions

Sansaku: Emotions

5/29/23

Knowing mood and contagious emotions, counselors learn to modulate.  When the client feels things are hopeless, we’re careful not to sink with the mood.  It takes ten times the effort to raise as it does to descend.

I feel smart around Garon and stable with Irma.  I felt free and wild with my Knifewing father.  Sitting at a table in the Cattleman’s Bar, he was strangely silent.  A mostly unlikely place and alone I wouldn’t enter.  Everyone stared.  Not at him.  He belonged.  I didn’t.

The table had a glass surface with a video ping-pong display.  Knifewing studied the pattern.  This went on a little too long.  Focused on the game, he didn’t notice when I reached down and pulled the plug.  He let out a scream that had the bar standing.  Someone dropped a glass.

Jim Silvernail came over and said, “What the hell, Denver.”  With manifest joy on his face and in his voice, he explained: “I’m proud of my son for doing what he did.  Now I know he’s mine.”  Now I belonged.

There’s a devil on the shoulder who whispers bad advice.  One lousy reason I failed to finish my thesis.  Knifewing counseled me to listen.  “Ask the devil to repeat.  Let him know you want to learn and are willing to relate.”  My introduction to the shadow.  Words fall far below.

I entered the portal last night and read the chart.  Cynthia went straight to the cancer, metastatic pain and what she’ll do when the PSA begins to rise.  Her notes woke me up and seeded my dreams.

A robin flew close to my head and pointed to some birds; the pattern to their feathers, a large and healthy tree.  I heard the robin say, “This is how to heal.”  The image got away, but not the mood.  Emotions are contagious and this is how I felt: No matter what, everything is best.

I Nuzzled Him Good

Sansaku:  I Nuzzled Him Good

5/28/23

Corder learned both Navajo and Zuni during a hide-out time in the Lukachukai Mountains.  The Grand Jury couldn’t find him to subpoena.  While he defended the mob, the mob would not reciprocate.

He liked to fight for underdogs, not mobsters, and I’m guessing he helped the ones who gave him Knifewing.  A black magic magician in court, I’m sure they’d approve of the name.  The bolo’s on my desk.

I’m looking at it now.  Angels have wings.  Knifewing no angel.  A fine piece of jewelry, it shimmers with meaning.  I don’t wear it very often, but use the bolo as a key to open memory.

Knives and keys are masculine symbols.  When Irma felt most helpless, a low point in her life, she dreamed of a man with a knife.  He stood between her and the car.  But one day, in a different dream, she chose to ask him why.  Confronting her fear, she approached the man with a knife, he handed her keys.  She didn’t know she’d lost them.

We talked about our fathers.  Hers had been a man impossible to please.  Almost always in a mood.  When she showed her therapist a photo, the counselor said, “He looks like George.”  This bothered her.

I didn’t look like Corder.  But then I met him.  My girlfriend said, “That’s how you’ll look at sixty.”  She wasn’t far off.  No one wants to be interpreted, but we long to be understood.  This applies to dreams.

Walking through our neighborhood in Boulder, the way it used to be, I pointed toward Flagstaff and the house of my wealthiest friend.  I loved the room full of games, pinball and pool, cokes in the fridge.  Their living room, as large as a gym, too formal to touch.  Outside the house, I saw a big black guard dog.  They kept theirs in a pen.  I nuzzled him good.       

A Single Cent

Sansaku: A Single Cent

5/27/23

The show we watched last night struck a chord and entered my dream.  She asked the audience: “Should I go ahead and break the rules?”  Everybody clapped, “Be bad.”  She was good.  In the dream, still on stage, she talked about an object called Knifewing.

It’s the name of the Zuni bolo tie our father wore.  I don’t know the myth, but the impression I got, the deity belonged to the dark side.  The reality for which I prepared included good and bad.

Twenty-two and finally cooked enough to handle the tension of opposites, our newborn relationship had a classic beginning.  He asked: “What took you so long?”  I answered with a question: “Why did you leave?”  He answered in kind: “How much time do you have?”  I asked: “How long are you going to live?”  He said: “We’d better get going.”

Stories are important cognitive events because they capture in small equations a great deal of knowledge and emotion.  A picture is worth a thousand words and stories a thousand pictures.

Ideals are outrageously practical.  The ideal of beauty gives us eyes for ugly.  The ideal of truth an ear for deception.  And we understand evil by the ideal of good.  Sheryll and Garon would agree, close to an ideal father, the fall was that much greater.

The current won’t flow without poles: positive and negative.  In my case, a measure of the father wound.  The split between the ideal and the real was considerable.  In that I’m not unique.

I wasn’t aware I’d come with open-hearted acceptance.  Neither was he.  But my level of understanding just enough to know.  In terms of my search for a self, I’d hit a jackpot and didn’t want to waste a single cent.

No Resistance

Sansaku: No Resistance

5/26/23

Traumatized kids with good imaginations create unbelievable realities, and since the unconscious suffers deception poorly, the split between ideal fantasy and real-world fact has consequences.  I’m experienced.

One of the first quotes I collected had this theme: Moderation in all things, including moderation.  This fits my behavior.  For the most part I’m moderate, but thanks to dad, I’ve got the touched-by-fire gene.

Another early quote that comes from Walden: To affect the quality of the day is the highest of the arts.  I learned early-on, I had to take care.  I take after Irma in that way.  Moderation.  Not just my body, but life.

When I told her I was like him.  Irma said: “You have his good qualities, but not the bad.”  I wasn’t wicked smart or really wicked; my evil mostly stupid.  When he died, we shipped him back to Colorado.

Looking in the coffin, his sister said: “That’s not Corder.”  I looked in and said: “You’re right, Aunt Margaret, that’s not Corder.  It’s Denver.  And that’s exactly how he looks.”  Like a gone-to-seed professor.  Long hair, Pan beard, messy clothes.  My favorite kind of teacher.

At the time of his death and my first year at Timberline, no school in the state could have exemplified the split between the ideal and the real any better.  I hadn’t been there long when someone said, dripping with irony, “Smile, you live in Paradise.”  Perfect.  Exactly what I needed.

I skipped yesterday’s dream:  The significance of omens.  Looking at a grove of ponderosa, I fed on the beauty and found a tiger eye stone on the trail.  I took it as an affirmation. Nothing’s accidental in a dream.

Last night a dream about aging.  The road turned into rock, the valley mined for gravel, shoveling summer snow.  No resistance to reality.

I’ll Never Deny

Sansaku: I’ll Never Deny

5/25/23

“Find the wound, you find the path to consciousness.  In the healing of the wound, we come to know ourselves.”  Jung

The split between the ideal and the real had started with my parents.  Their marriage on the rocks, they decided to have another baby as a pledge to stay together.  After church the next day, they conceived me.

A trial criminal lawyer, Corder began his defense by presenting the prosecution’s case much better than they could.  Irma said, “You could literally watch them sweat.”  She felt sorry for them.  “They knew they had lost before they began.  That’s why so many folded.”

Corder mastered the art of plea bargaining.  He said: “You’d be amazed how creative the prosecution gets when they’re afraid.”  Telling this to Irma, I heard myself say: “He could find the best in the worst and the worst in the best.”  She nodded, “You got it.”

The soul is said to read backwards.  It’s how I try to write.  I begin at the end.  Graduation is called Commencement, a word that means both beginning and end.  A time to look back and look forward.

That time in my life, between 22 and 24, is when I found the wound.  Instead of finishing my thesis on the ideal and the real, I took it to the field and made the trip between Boulder and Prescott many times.

The vow that led to my conception and the journey towards healing.  What I learned, I coded in a song: “It was in the night and into the night, we drove and you said, I know that we’re drunk, but hear what I say, I want you to know…   I see myself and my face in you too, and I could do just like you, but I won’t.  Taught me better than that.  I walk my way, I always will, and I’ll never deny…”

The Nirvana of Normalcy

Sansaku:  The Nirvana of Normalcy

5/24/23

I just learned he wrote a memoir, Flotsam.  I was jetsam, but not thrown out.  After David blessed me, I jettisoned myself and started swimming toward the southwest.  Land of dreams.

I didn’t complete my thesis: Integrating the Ideal and Real in Economic Theory.  But one of the chapters I remember, Buddhist Economics, came from Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful.  The argument for integration.

The ideal and the real, my legendary deadbeat dad.  David prepared me to deal.  He was living in Prescott; I lived in a van.  I knew the devil told lies, what I didn’t know, he could also tell the truth.

Economics had fucked with me.  A serious dose of not-so-pretty lies.  It’s why Corder ran away.  The horrible injustice of the law.  He didn’t need to read Veblen to learn that.  And while I couldn’t unsee what I’d seen in those catastrophic curves, I found my cure in dreams.

Who gets to teach dreams and lead groups for a living?  The ideal and the real.  I had a doozy last night.

I was helping two kids get some kind of treatment.  I woke and recorded the dream.  But I woke up again and realized I’d had a false awakening.  No recording.  So, I recorded the dream, slightly changed, then I woke up again.  Another false awakening.  This was getting strange.

An easy theme to spot: Thinking I’m awake when I’m not.  The subject was treatment and caring for kids.  It’s a wide net to cast.  Associations: I needed to apologize and did.  It went better than expected.

Natural beauty integrates the ideal with the real – it exists.  This is art for everyone.  My journal entry started: I listened to a robin sing.  A perfect song of ordinary magic.  The nirvana of normalcy.

Talk About a Dreamer

Sansaku: Talk About a Dreamer

5/23/23

It bears repeating: Yalom described therapy as a cyclic process that led from isolation to relationship.  I’m still grinding.  David didn’t share the traumas of his life.  We didn’t have a therapy relationship.  But I knew he was wounded and defended with a tough sophisticated shell.

We made an odd pair at the faculty club.  He was paunchy, going bald, and jaded.  I was young, long-haired, and dressed in Goodwill fashions.  To look more acceptable, he’d lend me a coat.  It didn’t work.

What I read in Veblen, I read in David.  He swam against the grain and could see a better way.  It’s hard to be idealistic in a ruthless economic reality.  I think of Joni’s song: “All good dreamers end this way.”

The last time I saw David, he’d accepted a position at Berkeley and I was headed out of economics into dreams.  I wasn’t meant to be a cynic.  Sitting in his study and not a dark café, he blew me away with a blessing.  He let me know his feelings, “I envy the life you will live.”

I didn’t have the language, but I was David’s positive shadow.  His lost idealism.  It’s what bothered him about my interpretation of Veblen.  I could tell that Veblen had been a dreamer and tried to map the vision.  It takes vision to dissect a culture the way Veblen could. 

“The quality of a society hangs on what its members do in their leisure time.”  This comes from Flow.  Veblen wrote Theory of the Leisure Class. It’s all about the way we waste, consume, show-off.

The book became popular with the crowd it was meant to offend.  He wanted to incite with seditious ideas.  But instead of revolution, they giggled.  A hundred and twenty-some years ago, a chapter on the barbarian status of women.  Talk about a dreamer. 

The Unconscious Answered

Sansaku:  The Unconscious Answered

5/22/23

Yalom described therapy as a cyclic process that led from isolation to relationship.  It’s how I work with dreams.  I relate and get to know them.  Last night, I met a cat that looked like a dog.

I could draw out the dream, but I bonded with the cat, the cat with me.  The one in a hundred connection.  Moonshadow wasn’t the name on his tag, but the color.  He followed me home.

Maybe just a coincidence, but I’ve been playing Cat Stevens and everyone knows what that song is about.  The cat pawed, rubbed and rolled.  Meant to be together.  Instant intimacy and total knowledge.

The culture pays scant attention to the voice of the body and instincts.  The dream had fed upon a show I watched about whales.  Directed by the creator of “Avatar” and narrated by Sigourney, the whales are living in Pandora.  Pan, by the way, was the name on the collar of the cat.

I’m still pondering the change in how I thought.  David pointed it out: “No way did you get what you wrote from that book.”  I disagreed and showed him the sentence: “The rich as well as the poor are punished for sleeping under bridges.”  I had done what I do with dreams.

I brought the writing to life and had a conversation.  It’s true.  What Veblen conveyed via active imagination wasn’t what was written in the book.  I’d read between the lines and then some.

I agreed I’d taken liberties with the passage, but then I asked: “Don’t you think it’s better?”  He didn’t like the question.  He said, “That’s not the point.”  Once again, I disagreed.

How did I know Moonshadow’s name?  And how did I know Veblen?  I entered the dream; I entered the book.  The unconscious answered.