Dreams

I'm not certain if I've ever written about my dreams. I've always had incredibly vivid dreams. I can clearly remember dreams I had over a decade ago. My dreams never have anyone I know in them. The people in my dreams are always strangers to me. That said, my dream a few nights ago was particularly vivid and potent.

I was standing in the desert on a tall dune. The sand was a very light, yet rich, tan color. The mountains in the distance were a dark chocolate color and extremely craggy and sharp. Above me were thin, wispy, bleach white cirrus clouds floating in a light blue sky. The sky seemed to be like a low-hanging ceiling (think of basement's that you have to lower your head to walk through because the ceiling above is lower than usual.) The sky was vast and expansive and I could easily see its curvature.

A woman appeared beside me and the sky began to rotate overhead. She pointed to one area coming over the horizon and it was a round, craggy break in the sky as if someone took a hammer and shattered a hole in it. Through that craggy opening I could see what was beyond the boundary of the sky ceiling. It was an even deeper blue sky, almost cerulean. My impression was that this was a sphere outside the sky ceiling above me rotating independently. In it (on it?) were painted stars, planets, moons, and other celestial bodies. The style was that of vintage woodcuts or illustrations, much like the kind in the image above. The heavenly bodies were shimmering as if they were drawn or painted with gold. As that rotated by, other craggy holes rotated past in the sky ceiling with similar things to see through them, all in that shimmering gold in the same deep, cerulean blue sky.

The woman never said anything but pointed to each opening as it rolled past. My sense was that she was showing me the "more" of the situation or place and my awe and wonder was overwhelming. She was making me see there was more to life. More to what is going on. More than what we can perceive or that we allow ourselves to be aware of. If we just look a bit beyond our range we can see and understand so much more.

A Solitary Walk

I’ve taken to each day after work taking a nice mile or so walk around the neighborhood. Today being colder and the snow flurries on and off all afternoon made it feel like mid to early-late Autumn. The clouds had that Fall look, stark white and billowing on top, flat and grey on the bottom. The cold wind gusts only added to the Autumn feeling. Given the circumstances of Shelter in Place I was practically the only one out, and barely any traffic gave it all a cozy, desolate feeling I actually enjoyed. I stopped at one point and just watched the trees and the clouds. I thought to myself, "What do they care about COVID? They don't." It’s as foreign to them as the bees Colony Collapse Disorder is to us. They simply go about their silent, regal business. Floating across the sky and swaying in the breeze. I was struck by their humble arrogance, their steadfastness. Their world continues uninterrupted. They’re unaffected by us either way. Be here or don’t be here, they could care less. There’s a much higher purpose they’re an integral part of we haven’t recognized yet. They get the interconnection of it all and we don’t. We’re as foreign and almost meaningless to them as the gnats are to us.

Kensho, Satori, Working Out, and Oneness

Kensho, sometimes interchanged with the concept satori is generally defined as an insight or awakening. A glimpse into deeper understanding. I like to think of it as a flash of epiphany or "oneness". A connection to a deeper cosmic harmony. I was at the gym this morning listening to "A Stream With Bright Fish" from the album "The Pearl". I've been doing what I call "mindful workouts" lately. Totally focused on the rep and the connection between mind and muscle being worked. Slow, deeply focused repetitions. Not sloppy form, but form that really gets deep into the muscle. As I finished one set and that song was playing I looked out the window at the clouds floating by. In that flash of an instant everything was in synch. The floating clouds, the music, my workout, and my presence. It was all a brief nanosecond of profound harmony and sense of belonging with everything.

It was a great and profoundly serene moment. Everything around me fell away and it's just me in tandem with everything I mentioned.

I've had this experience two other times in my life. They were much deeper and profound than this one, which is not to minimize or take away from the one this morning. The one I had as a teenager I was walking off the football practice field. I literally, for a nanosecond, "felt" the Milky Way. I could see it from the outside. I could feel its rhythms and felt as if I was in all places at the same time.

In relating this to my friend Dan thinking it sounded a bit crazy. He commented, "It doesn't sound crazy at all. I have had two, one on a the lawn I have 5, and another in my grandmother's house when I was about 20. I was alone, looking at a fan rotate."

The sensation almost defies words when it happens. Mine have always been just a second or two. But within those few seconds is a vast expanse of time, I sense. My friend Dan says he sustained his for several minutes, and I told him I wished I could learn to sustain mine for that length of time. But I got to thinking, maybe I'm not supposed to sustain it. Maybe it's fleeting for a reason. A taste, so to speak, of the larger harmonies.

Mantra for the Day